Despite my reservations about Microsoft’s charging model for Windows Azure’s virtual machine (IaaS) capabilities, I was interested enough to take a look after last week’s Microsoft Tech.Days Online event. I signed up for a 90 day (750-hours/month) free trial (which, on the face of it, seems pretty poor in comparison to the 1 year free usage tier from Amazon but, because Amazon have to license Windows, and Microsoft can presumably cross-charge itself, Windows virtual machines are excluded from Amazon’s trial).

It was amazingly simple to get myself up and running with a new virtual machine and I thought I’d demonstrate that here:

1. If you don’t already have one, sign up for a Windows Azure account and log on to the Windows Azure management console.
2. On the All Items pane, select Create An Item:
   
3. Select Virtual Machine and then From Gallery:
   
4. Choose an operating system for the virtual machine, for example Windows Server 2012:
   
5. Give the virtual machine a name, supply an Administrator password, and select a size (if you’re using the free trial, then you’ll want to select the small option):
   
6. This will be a standalone virtual machine, but it needs a DNS name (for access from the Internet), some storage (I auto-generated the storage) and a region/affinity group/virtual network (I selected the West Europe region, as I’m in the UK and didn’t yet have any virtual networks assigned):
   
7. The availability set is not really of any significance when running a single VM, so I left this as none:
   
8. Windows Azure will start to provision the virtual machine:
   
9. Once completed, the newly-created virtual machine and associate storage will be visible in the console:
10. Click on the virtual machine name to access the virtual machine dashboard which contains performance information as well as configuration details. From here, you can make further configuration changes (e.g. creating endpoints for access to the virtual machine):