Virtual Machines

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Provision, migrate, and manage your virtual machines

Provision on-demand, scalable compute infrastructure when you need to quickly provision resources for you business needs.

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Explore

Tutorial:

Create your first Windows virtual machine

Creating a virtual machine that is running the Windows Server operating system is easy when you use the Image Gallery in the Windows Azure Management Portal. With no prior experience, you can create a virtual machine running the Windows Server operating system in the cloud that you can access and customize.

How To:

How to Log on to a Virtual Machine Running Windows Server

Learn how to start a Remote Desktop Connection from the Windows Azure Management Portal for a virtual machine that is running Windows Server.

How To:

How to Capture an Image of a Virtual Machine Running Windows Server

Learn how to capture and use your own images to create customized virtual machines. If you want to create multiple virtual machines that are set up the same way, you can capture an image of a configured virtual machine and use that image as a template.

Manage

Guidance:

Manage the Availability of Virtual Machines

Learn to use multiple virtual machines in Windows Azure so that your applications remain available during local network failures, local disk hardware failures, and planned downtime.

Guidance:

Load Balancing Virtual Machines

Learn how to set up load balancing among multiple virtual machines that are part of a cloud service.

Guidance:

Getting started with Windows Azure PowerShell

Learn to manage Windows-based virtual machines from the command line with the Windows Azure cmdlets for Windows PowerShell.

Guidance:

Windows Azure management cmdlets

This cmdlet Help reference gives you parameters and examples for each cmdlet so you can quickly understand how to use each Windows Azure cmdlet.

Build

Tutorial:

Run a compute-intensive task in .NET on a Windows Azure virtual machine

Virtual machines are a useful way to quickly move an existing application to the cloud. This tutorial shows how to create a Windows Azure virtual machine and use it to host a compute-intensive .NET application. It then demonstrates how you can extend the application with Windows Azure services, by using Service Bus queues to remotely monitor the compute task.

Tutorial:

Run the Apache Tomcat application server a virtual machine

Create a virtual machine running on Windows Azure and configure it to run Tomcat, a Java application server. You will learn how to use Windows Azure Virtual Machines to host Java applications.

Tutorial:

Host a Django-based web site on a virtual machine

Learn how to host a Django-based website on Windows Azure using a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine. You will learn how to setup a Windows Azure virtual machine to host Django and how to create a new Django application from Windows.

SQL Server on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

Tutorial:

Provisioning a SQL Server Virtual Machine on Windows Azure

Follow the steps in this tutorial to create a SQL Server virtual machine from the gallery, set it up, and connect to it.

Guidance:

SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines

Guidance and tutorials to help you understand how to use SQL Server with Windows Azure virtual machines. This library guidance covers getting started, migration, deployment, performance, security, connectivity, the images in the virtual machine gallery that contain SQL Server, and other topics.

SharePoint on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

Guidance:

SharePoint 2013 on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services

This white paper can help IT professionals, architects, and system administrators decide if deploying Microsoft SharePoint 2013 on Windows Azure Virtual Machines is the right choice for their organization.

Guidance:

SharePoint 2010 Deployment on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

This white paper can help you plan and design a virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2010 infrastructure on Windows Azure.