Creating an Azure Virtual Machine With Visual Studio In a Few Minutes

In this article, I will demonstrate the step-by-step creation of a virtual machine with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 community version within a few minutes. Normally, when we try to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 community version on our own machine, it takes a few hours.

To start, we need to create a new account or log in to our Azure account here. For this article, I am using Microsoft’s classic portal. The reason behind using this portal is, it's easy to understand for the beginners.

1. To view all the virtual machines previously created, click virtual machines.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Click create a virtual machine.
   
   
3. Here, we have two options to create VM, Quick Create or from Gallery. In Quick creation, we can customize VM as per our need , going from Basic Plan Shared core with 768MB RAM upto 32 Cores with 448 GB RAM. Here, we can choose any operating system Image like Windows family or Linux family images.
   
   
   
   
4. If you want to choose from Gallery option, we have number of templates. Azure has a wide range of templates, which includes different Microsoft platforms like Sharepoint, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio and different Linux environment like Centos, SUSE etc. Selecting these templates means some Applications will be pre-installed and are ready to use, once your VM is up and running.
   
   
   
   
5. For example, we can select Visual Studio in left pane and select Visual Studio Community 2015 update 3 with Azure SDK 2.9.1 and click Next (->).
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. In the next dialog, we need to provide some information like VM Name, Tier, Size of RAM and number of CPU Cores, User Name, New Password and Confirm Password. Tier refers to; there will be a pricing associated with each tier.
   
   
7. In this dialog we need to choose / create cloud service. This service will be used to host VM. We need to provide DNS of this Cloud Service. We need to choose Region/Virtual Network, which is used to select a region where the Virtual machine will be hosted. Based on your current location or as per your need, we can choose a region of virtual machine hosting. We can use automatically generated Storage account for virtual machine. Storage account is required to place our virtual hard drive.
   
   
   
   Afterwards, we can click next (->).
   
   
8. Based on your need, you can choose any of the available options or simply click finish.
   
   
   
   
9. Now wait for 5-6 mins (based on your network speed). Your virtual machine will be ready to be used. Most of the time will be consumed to start the virtual machine. Otherwise, the machine creation take only two minutes or less.
   
   
   
   
10. After waiting for a while, your virtual machine will be ready to use. To connect your virtual machine, click connect.
    
    
    
    
11. On the click of a connect, there will be a .rdp file, which will be downloaded. Open this file.
    
    
    
    
    
    
12. Click connect. Use your login credential to access your virtual machine.
    
    
    
    
13. Once your desktop is visible, you can go to all apps and open Visual Studio 2015.

Thus, in a few minutes of your development, machine is ready to be used with the required tools. Moreover, it is available with 228 GB RAM and 32 CPU Cores.

Once your virtual machine is ready, we can easily scale up or scale down (increase or decrease RAM and CPU cores) by choosing some options under configure tab. For changing the configuration, return back to Azure portal and go to Virtual Machines -> select your virtual machine and click on configure. Here, in this page, choose option from Virtual Machine Size.


You need to be cautious in regards to which virtual machine is being used, because these will drain your available credit rapidly. Virtual machines continue to incur compute charges, if they are stopped from the guest operating system. To avoid these charges, use the management portal to stop the virtual machines or to delete them.