Creating the First Azure Virtual Machine

In previous sections we covered configuration of the network. Now we are going to create the first instance. As discussed in Computing Resources Used in this Tutorial, we need two disks. This section also discusses how to create the second disk.

1. Go to “Virtual Machine” and click “Add” to create a new VM.

2. Enter the following values:

• Resource group: LK-QSG
• Virtual machine name: node-a (when you create 2nd or 3rd nodes, this would be node-b and node-c)
• Region: Specify region based on your decision earlier
• Availability options: Availability Zone
• Availability Zone: 1 (when you create 2nd or 3rd nodes, this would be 2 and 3)
• Image: Select supported operating system
• Size: You can select image size based on the application you are going to protect. Minimum Requirement here is Standard_B1s
• Authentication type: You can select each option. In general, cloud providers recommend using SSH public key.
• username: azureuser (you can leave the default value)
• SSH public key source: Generate new key pair if you have not created a key before
• Key pair name: specify name (this screenshot uses Azure-LK-QuickStart)
• Public inbound ports: None

Once you enter or select these values, click “Next: Disks”.

3. By default, the wizard creates one disk to boot the operating system. You need an additional disk for data replication.

Click “Create and attach a new disk”.

4. Select the disk size. To evaluate LifeKeeper, please create at least an 8 GiB disk.

Click “Change size” to specify the disk size.

5. Select the disk size (select at least 8 GiB if you are evaluating LifeKeeper), then select “OK”.

6. Now the disk size is specified. Click “OK” to confirm.

7. Once the disk configuration is finished, click “Next: Networking”.

8. Select the following parameters for the network:

• Virtual network: LK-VNET
• Subnet: LK-subnet
• Public IP: (new) node-a-ip
• NIC network security group: Advanced
• Configure network security group: LK-NSG

Once you specify the values, click “Review + create” to complete.

9. Once the wizard validates your input, click “Create”.

10. If this is the first time you are using the key pair, download the private key file. You will need the key file to connect to the instance later.

11. Once the virtual machine is created, you can see the configuration of the VM. You may notice that we haven’t specified the IP address yet and the DHCP assigned address 10.20.0.4 was chosen automatically. Click “Networking” (the blue link) to change the network configuration.

12. You can see in the screenshot below that the virtual machine has a network interface (node-a717). Click node-a717 to change configuration of this network card.

13. Now you can see the details of the network card. Click “IP configurations”.

14. Select the IP address to go to configuration page.

15. Change Assignment from Dynamic to Static and set the IP address to 10.20.1.10.

Once you specify the IP address, click “Save”.

16. The configuration of the virtual machine is done.