Tag Archives: azureportal

Building a Virtual Machine within Azure (IaSS) – Improvements !

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Those Dev’s/UX designers out there at Microsoft seems to be pretty busy as they releasing back to back updates to windows azure portal over the last couple of months.

I had to create a VM in Azure to do some testing, and this time I decided to try out the new portal. Apparently, I’m not a great fan of Windows 8 styled tiles, but on Azure portal these tile like options are not that bad.

I selected virtual machine from the add button(+) and the portal gave a nice view of the available options  :

Create VM

I’m pretty impressed with the amount of flavors you have now for the VMs. Oracle Linux, Open SUSE ! Cool !

I picked SQL2014 standard, and started the create process. When you start entering the details like host name, user name etc. everything looks same as before but as you click the pricing tier, there comes some improvements.

You now have an option to check all the pricing tiers and can get an idea on the approx. monthly costs pretty easily.

Click the image for better resolution.

Create VM2
Icing on the cake is the Max IOPS numbers. This is way cool and handy to know and have.

Create VM3

I chose something small and started exploring more. I gave the hostname and all other required things and chose check box, “Add to Startboard”. This will just add the new VM to azure portal home page.

Portal started giving me cool visualization when the VM was getting created, and the current actions were getting displayed in the notifications area.

Create VM4

As soon as the VM was created its details were made available in the startboard. There are some cool data like Disk, CPU, Network etc. which definitely will come handy for everyone.

Create VM5

The process to add an alert for a specific matric looks pretty straight forward within the portal. I tried to set an alert for disk, and here is what the portal has to offer.

Create VM6

Overall, I’m really glad the way Microsoft Azure has improved over the last couple of years and now this is shaping up to be one of the trusted platforms to host critical workloads with great management capabilities.

Thanks for reading and keep watching this space for more! (Hint: Some cool SQL2014 related posts are on the way !)

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Microsoft Azure Portal Preview looks promising !

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This is one of those posts which is pending for a very long time. I was pretty excited when Azure Portal Preview was announced during BUILD2014. This portal will deeply enhance developer experience.

As a SQLServer person I was interested to explore more within the portal to see what in store for me, and here are some of the cool things which the portal had to offer me.

As soon as you login, the page welcomes you with some great information such as Service Status, Billing info etc.

Portal1

If you interested to know about a service, there is great level of information which is made available in the portal.

Portal2

If you drill down to the billing details, then you are provided with some nice stats.

Portal3

You have the option to right click a particular view and you can pin it to the startboard( Yes, Windows8 theme is everywhere !)

Portal4

Portal5

You can even do customizations for the view which was added to the startboard.

I tried to create a SQLDatabase using the portal, and it allowed me to create a web edition one with 1GB size. (Remember this is still preview). Here are the steps

Portal6

Portal7

There are lot of things like creating VMs is not available in preview for now, but the layout looks neat.(Again, if you are a windows8 user, then you will love it !)

Portal8

 

One thing really excited me was the view for storage. Everything was laid out nicely. Quite impressive !

Portal9

Conclusion  :

I’m looking forward to this portal, and I’m pretty sure that it will add more value to everyone.

Keep watching this space for more.