This is the second post in this series. Last week I have showed you how to create a 3 months trial account for Windows Azure and set up the Portal. Today I will continue from where we stopped last time, and show you how to create the virtual machine we need.
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The second stage is to create a Virtual Machine. Click “NEW” on the bottom left corner.
You will notice the Virtual Machine item on the left hand menu is disabled. If you move your mouse over it, you will see the following message.
Basically this message means you need to add Virtual Machine service into your Subscription, so you can just click the link to try the Virtual Machine service. Again, if you cancel your account within 3 months, you don’t need to pay anything.
So after you click “try it now”, the Virtual Machines service will be added into your Subscription. Just click the “Tick” icon to confirm.
Now you can go back to your Portal of Windows Azure. The Virtual Machines tab on the left hand menu will be enabled, and you can create a new Virtual Machine now by clicking the link.
Here I will use “crm2011trial” as the DNS Name, chose “Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Evaluation Edition” Image, and type in your own password. Since this one just a trial Virtual Machine, so I chose “Large (4 cores, 7 GB Memory)” as Size to make our machine faster.
After you click “CREATE VIRTUAL MACHINE”, you should see the following page.
Your virtual machine is “Starting (Provisioning)”. It will take around 20 minutes before you can connect to the virtual machine you created, so you can go an make a coffee now if you like, and hopefully it says “Running” when you come back.
In my next blog post, I will show you how to connect to the virtual machine we created, and install Dynamics CRM 2011 there. Stay tuned.
*Image: http://wallpapers.free-review.net/23__Windows_Azure.htm