What are Virtual Machines?
What are Virtual Machines?
Azure Virtual Machines is one of several types of on-demand, scalable
computing resources that Azure offers. Typically, you'll choose a virtual
machine if you need more control over the computing environment than the
choices such as App Service or Cloud Services offer. Azure Virtual Machines
provide you with an operating system, storage, and networking capabilities and
can run a wide range of applications.
An Azure virtual machine gives you the flexibility of virtualization without having
to buy and maintain the physical hardware that runs the virtual machine.
However, you still need to maintain the virtual machine – configuring, patching,
and maintaining the software that runs on the virtual machine.
Azure Virtual Machines lets you create and use virtual machines in the cloud.
Providing what's known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), virtual machine
technology can be used in variety of ways.
Examples of when to use Virtual Machines
• Test and Development. Virtual machines provide a quick and easy way to
create different operating system and application configurations. Test and
Development can then easily delete the VMs when they are no longer needed.
• Running applications in the cloud. The ability to run certain applications in
the public cloud as opposed to creating a traditional infrastructure to run those
applications can provide substantial economic benefits. For example, if an
application needs to handle fluctuations in demand, being able to shut VMs
down when you don’t need them or quickly start them up to meet a sudden
increased demand means you only pay for the resources you are using.
• Extending your data center to the cloud. An organization can extend the
capabilities of its own on-premises network by creating a virtual network (VNET)
in Azure and adding VMs to that VNET. Applications like SharePoint can then
run on an Azure VM instead of running locally, making it easier to deploy or less
expensive to do so than in an on-premises environment.
• Disaster recovery. Similar to running certain types of applications in the cloud
and extending an on-premises network to the cloud, you can use an IaaS-based
approach to disaster recovery, and obtain significant costs savings. If a primary
datacenter fails, you can create the VMs running on Azure to run your critical
applications, then shut them down when the primary datacenter is once more
operational.
To read more about typical scenarios for running Azure VMs, see this article in
the Azure Documentation.
For more information, you can see:
Azure Virtual Machines: https://aka.ms/edx-azure202x-az01
App Service: https://aka.ms/edx-azure202x-az03
Cloud Services Pricing: https://aka.ms/edx-azure202x-az04
Virtual Network: https://aka.ms/edx-azure202x-az05