Hello all, I hope everyone is safe.

Today we are going to discuss the virtual machine service on Azure. I am preparing for the Azure Administrator exam (AZ-104) and I decided to share whatever I am learning throughout the preparation so it might be helpful for others like me.

So let us start with a virtual machine.

What is a virtual machine?

A virtual machine (VM) is an abstraction of the physical environment that functions as a virtual computer system with its CPU, memory, network interface, and storage, created on a physical hardware system. So in another word, a virtual machine is a virtual environment with its resources and abstracted from the physical hardware. This is a general definition of a virtual machine.

The virtual machine service allows you to deploy virtual machines on Azure.

So let us take the example of a company that wants to set up a couple of virtual machines. Let's say one virtual machine is used for a web server and another for a database server and so on. So the company has to buy physical storage, and networking devices server and use a hypervisor to enable virtualization on the server.

A lot of expenses and a lot of work right? But these are not needed when you use the Virtual machine on Azure.

Benefits of Virtual Machine on Azure

• The benefit of the virtual machine service is that the company needs not to buy and manage the physical server and other devices because storage, networking, and infrastructure are completely managed by Microsoft Azure. All we need to do is we can go to the Azure portal and create a virtual machine and use it.

• Another benefit is that at any point in time you can just go ahead and delete these virtual machines if you don't need them anymore. But in the case of the company, it is not true, the company has bought this infrastructure. So if they don't deploy anything using this infrastructure it's a complete waste of an investment.

• The biggest advantage is that you get to use the services such as a virtual machine service on a pay-as-you-go model. So you only pay for what you consume. If you don't need it you don't need to use the service.

Things to know before deploying the virtual machine to Azure

When you deploy a virtual machine on Azure, it deploys the virtual machine and deploys other resources. It deploys virtual networks, disks, virtual network cards, and network security groups. Let us see what are these quickly.

Virtual Network

The virtual machine needs to reside virtually and this is like a home for the virtual machine.

Disks

Two disks get deployed with the virtual machine and they are an OS disk and a temporary disk.

OS disk is used for holding OS-level data and the temporary disk is used for holding the temporary data but whenever the machine is stopped you will lose all your data from this disk.

Virtual network card

Data that is sent and received by the virtual machine goes via the network interface and the network interface can have private and public IP addresses.

Network security group

A network security group, also called NSG, is like a firewall. NSG decides what type of traffic flows into and out of the virtual machine.

So in this article, we learned what is the virtual machine service on Azure and what are things that need to be considered before deploying the Virtual machine, and what are the benefits.

Next, we will see how to deploy Windows and Linux virtual machines on Azure. I hope it helps you stay safe.

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