Azure “Cheat Sheet” for Creating VMs

Please read this document carefully before starting!

For Part 2 of the assignment you can create a free student Azure account (it should not require a credit
card). Follow instructions here to get started: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students/#free-
products-section. Use your McGill credentials. This free account will provide you with a $100US credit
good for up to 12 months. There is another free Azure offer for $200US, but the credit is only good for
one month, which will not be long enough for the course so please stick with the student offer.

Once your account is activated for Azure, login to Azure here: https://portal.azure.com.

To create a Windows VM there is a quick start tutorial here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-

us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/quick-create-portal. The quickstart for Linux is here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-ca/azure/virtual-machines/linux/quick-create-
portal?toc=%2Fazure%2Fvirtual-machines%2Flinux%2Ftoc.json

• For Windows you want to choose Windows Server 2019 Datacenter

• For Linux you want to choose Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS or 20.04 LTS. It’s much easier to use
password login rather than key pairs, so I recommend choosing this option when deploying
• Remember to open up the appropriate ports to allow you to login. For Windows Server that
means RDP, and for Linux that means SSH.
• Make sure you choose the size B1S for the vms if you do not want to consume credit. You are
entitled to one free Windows VM and one free Linux VM of this size. You will need to change
the size from the default! You may find that size B1S is not large enough to complete the
exercises in the lab or the assignment, but you can easily re-size it (larger or smaller) whenever
you like.

Tips on conserving your free credit:

• Always choose the smallest VM size that meets your needs. For the course you may need to go
larger than B1S, but it would never be necessary to go larger than B2S (under $50/month). Also,
you can shop around to see which Azure region is the least expensive for this VM (and it make
no difference for the assignment). US East is often the cheapest.
• When creating a Windows VM make sure you select the checkbox to indicate that you will use
an existing Windows license. This will reduce the cost a bit and a license is not required for your
usage with this course.

• Change from Premium SSD disk to Standard HDD.

 Standard HDD is slower, but is normally fast enough for this course and it will save some money.

• Always make sure that you stop your VM when you are not working on it. You are only charged
for the minutes that it is running so stopping it can save you a lot of money. Note that you must
stop it from the portal. Shutting down from within the VM itself does not put it into the
Stopped (deallocated) state that stops the meter.
You can also configure a VM to automatically shutdown at a particular time so that it is
impossible to forget. I highly recommend this!