Tutorial: Create and Manage Windows VMs with Azure PowerShell
Article
Applies to: ✔️ Windows VMs
Azure virtual machines provide a fully configurable and flexible computing environment. This tutorial covers basic Azure virtual machine (VM) deployment tasks like selecting a VM size, selecting a VM image, and deploying a VM. You learn how to:
Create and connect to a VM
Select and use VM images
View and use specific VM sizes
Resize a VM
View and understand VM state
Launch Azure Cloud Shell
The Azure Cloud Shell is a free interactive shell that you can use to run the steps in this article. It has common Azure tools preinstalled and configured to use with your account.
To open the Cloud Shell, just select Try it from the upper right corner of a code block. You can also launch Cloud Shell in a separate browser tab by going to https://shell.azure.com/powershell. Select Copy to copy the blocks of code, paste it into the Cloud Shell, and press enter to run it.
An Azure resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed. A resource group must be created before a virtual machine. In the following example, a resource group named myResourceGroupVM is created in the EastUS region:
The resource group is specified when creating or modifying a VM, which can be seen throughout this tutorial.
Create a VM
When creating a VM, several options are available like operating system image, network configuration, and administrative credentials. This example creates a VM named myVM, running the default version of Windows Server 2016 Datacenter.
Set the username and password needed for the administrator account on the VM with Get-Credential:
After the deployment has completed, create a remote desktop connection with the VM.
Run the following commands to return the public IP address of the VM. Take note of this IP Address so you can connect to it with your browser to test web connectivity in a future step.
Use the following command, on your local machine, to create a remote desktop session with the VM. Replace the IP address with the publicIPAddress of your VM. When prompted, enter the credentials used when creating the VM.
mstsc /v:<publicIpAddress>
In the Windows Security window, select More choices and then Use a different account. Type the username and password you created for the VM and then click OK.
Understand marketplace images
The Azure marketplace includes many images that can be used to create a new VM. In the previous steps, a VM was created using the Windows Server 2016 Datacenter image. In this step, the PowerShell module is used to search the marketplace for other Windows images, which can also be used as a base for new VMs. This process consists of finding the publisher, offer, SKU, and optionally a version number to identify the image.
Use the Get-AzVMImageOffer to return a list of image offers. With this command, the returned list is filtered on the specified publisher named MicrosoftWindowsServer:
This information can be used to deploy a VM with a specific image. This example deploys a VM using the latest version of a Windows Server 2016 with Containers image.
The VM size determines the amount of compute resources like CPU, GPU, and memory that are made available to the VM. Virtual machines should be created using a VM size appropriate for the workload. If a workload increases, an existing virtual machine can also be resized.
VM Sizes
The following table categorizes sizes into use cases.
If the size you want isn't available on the current cluster, the VM needs to be deallocated before the resize operation can occur. Deallocating a VM will remove any data on the temp disk, and the public IP address will change unless a static IP address is being used.
The VM is stopped. Virtual machines in the stopped state still incur compute charges.
Deallocating
The VM is being deallocated.
Deallocated
Indicates that the VM is removed from the hypervisor but is still available in the control plane. Virtual machines in the Deallocated state do not incur compute charges.
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The power state of the VM is unknown.
To get the state of a particular VM, use the Get-AzVM command. Be sure to specify a valid name for a VM and resource group.
To retrieve the power state of all the VMs in your subscription, use the Virtual Machines - List All API with parameter statusOnly set to true.
Management tasks
During the lifecycle of a VM, you may want to run management tasks like starting, stopping, or deleting a VM. Additionally, you may want to create scripts to automate repetitive or complex tasks. Using Azure PowerShell, many common management tasks can be run from the command line or in scripts.
You can delete a VM, but by default this only deletes the VM resource, not the disks and networking resources the VM uses. You can change the default behavior to delete other resources when you delete the VM. For more information, see Delete a VM and attached resources.
Next steps
In this tutorial, you learned about basic VM creation and management such as how to:
Create and connect to a VM
Select and use VM images
View and use specific VM sizes
Resize a VM
View and understand VM state
Advance to the next tutorial to learn about VM disks.