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Exercise - Create a virtual machine

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Let's start with the most obvious task: creating an Azure Virtual Machine.

Logins, subscriptions, and resource groups

You'll be working in the Azure Cloud Shell on the right. Once you activate the sandbox, you'll be logged into Azure with a free subscription that Microsoft Learn manages. You don't have to log in to Azure on your own or select a subscription; this is done for you. You'd also normally create a resource group to hold new resources. In this module, the Azure sandbox creates a resource group for you, which you'll use to execute all the commands.

Create a Linux VM with the Azure CLI

The Azure CLI includes the vm command to work with virtual machines in Azure. We can supply several subcommands to do specific tasks. The most common include:

Sub-command	Description
create	Create a new virtual machine
deallocate	Deallocate a virtual machine
delete	Delete a virtual machine
list	List the created virtual machines in your subscription
open-port	Open a specific network port for inbound traffic
restart	Restart a virtual machine
show	Get the details for a virtual machine
start	Start a stopped virtual machine
stop	Stop a running virtual machine
update	Update a property of a virtual machine

Note

For a complete list of commands, you can check the Azure CLI reference documentation.

Let's start with the first one: az vm create. You can use this command to create a virtual machine in a resource group. There are several parameters you can pass to configure all the aspects of the new VM. The four parameters that must be supplied are:

Parameter	Description
--resource-group	The resource group that will own the virtual machine; use [sandbox Resource Group].
--name	The name of the virtual machine; must be unique within the resource group.
--image	The operating system image to use to create the VM.
--location	The region in which to place the VM. Typically, this would be close to the VM's consumer.

In addition, it's helpful to add the --verbose flag to see progress while the VM is being created.

Create a Linux virtual machine

Let's create a new Linux virtual machine. Execute the following command in Azure Cloud Shell to create an Ubuntu VM in the "West US" location.

az vm create \
  --resource-group <rgn>[sandbox resource group name]</rgn> \
  --location westus \
  --name SampleVM \
  --image Ubuntu2204 \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --generate-ssh-keys \
  --verbose 

Tip

You can use the Copy button to copy commands to the clipboard. To paste, right-click on a new line in the Cloud Shell terminal and select Paste, or use the Shift+Insert keyboard shortcut (⌘+V on macOS).

This command creates a new Ubuntu Linux virtual machine with the name SampleVM. Notice that the Azure CLI tool waits while the VM is being created. You can add the --no-wait option to tell the Azure CLI tool to return immediately and have Azure continue creating the VM in the background. This is useful if you're executing the command in a script.

We're specifying the administrator account name through the --admin-username flag to be azureuser. If you omit this, the az vm create command will use your current user name. Because the rules for account names are different for each OS, it's safer to specify a specific name.

Note

Common names such as "root" and "admin" aren't allowed for most images.

We're also using the generate-ssh-keys flag. Linux distributions use this parameter, and it creates a pair of security keys so we can use the ssh tool to access the virtual machine remotely. The two files are placed into the .ssh folder on your machine and in the VM. If you already have an SSH key named id_rsa in the target folder, then that SSH key will be used rather than generating a new key.

Once Azure CLI finishes creating the VM, you'll get a JSON response which includes the current state of the virtual machine and its public and private IP addresses assigned by Azure:

{
  "fqdns": "",
  "id": "/subscriptions/20f4b944-fc7a-4d38-b02c-900c8223c3a0/resourceGroups/Learn-2568d0d0-efe3-4d04-a08f-df7f009f822a/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/SampleVM",
  "location": "westus",
  "macAddress": "00-0D-3A-58-F8-45",
  "powerState": "VM running",
  "privateIpAddress": "10.0.0.4",
  "publicIpAddress": "40.83.165.85",
  "resourceGroup": "2568d0d0-efe3-4d04-a08f-df7f009f822a",
  "zones": ""
}

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