Posted on by Joe

How to setup and utilize a Server 2012 VM in Microsoft Azure

What is Microsoft Azure?

Azure is a comprehensive set of cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy, and manage applications through a global network of datacenters. Integrated tools, DevOps.

Why use Microsoft Azure?

  • Scalability
  • Cost
  • Speed
  • Security
  • Availability

Server 2012 R2 Deployment:

Most of this set up process is to be done in a browser.

First you will need to sign up with Microsoft Azure, pretty straight forward process, except they ask for your phone number to “verify you identity”, which I find to be a little odd

After you’ve signed up and logged in, they direct you straight to the Azure control panel, click on “+ New”

Search for server 2012

And click “Create”

Only to find out that you’ll need to “Upgrade” your subscription

Here you’ll need to sign up for a free trial

And they wants your credit card info

You will have $200 worth of credit to use during the trial

Go back to the dashboard, find Server 2012 R2 and click “Create”

And configure some settings for the new server

“Name” = server name, “User name” = administrator name, and “resource group” is just a container in Azure for ease of management

Step 2, here you can decide the amount of hardware resources your server can have, Microsoft gives you some recommended pre-configured models to choose from, but in a free trial, you won’t be able to crank up the number of virtual CPUs and RAM anyway, I picked the first one.

Step 3, some network settings and miscellaneous stuff, the network part will be auto-filled, leave at default unless you need to change anything

Step 3 Cont.

Step 4, summary, if everything looks good, click “Create”. Note they charge $.014 per hour for this particular set up.

Wait for the deployment to finish, in my case it took less than 5 minutes

Once it is done, the server dashboard pops up, you can view the server status here, click on “Connect” to connect to the server, and a .rdp file will be downloaded, use it to establish a remote desktop connection to your server

Enter your administrator credentials

And that’s it, you are in. 

 

Reference:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-azure/