Overview of the Azure Portal and Services

- [Instructor] SysAdmins are going to be working in usually one of three different types of cloud services. Could be just one, it could be two or all three. And the one that I'm going to demonstrate for you right now is Azure Services within Microsoft. The other two would be Google, as well as Amazon Web Services. And a lot of them have very similar types of services. They have storage, they have virtual machines, they have a directory service of some kind. However, in the case of synchronization with Active Directory on premises and for replacement for on-prem Active Directory, then Azure Services has the most amount of compatibility in a Windows network. But you're also going to find that you can create Linux virtual machines as well. Now, inside the Azure services, I'm going to go to where it says More services and show you that there are over 100 different services within Azure. Now, you don't need to know all these different things because a lot of these different services are for DevOps or programmers, things like that. And if you're a SysAdmin, you just don't need to know every single thing in here. The main areas that you'll need to know are going to be Entra ID because of the fact that you will integrate that with Microsoft 365 and single sign-on. And I'll just go ahead and select Entra ID and open it in a new tab. And, of course, as you've seen previously here, you can manage users and groups and a whole lot of other types of resources. And you can also use it for monitoring as well, such as sign-in logs, audit logs, provision logs, the health of your devices, and various other options. I'm going to go back to All services. The other area that you should really be familiar with is going to be storage. Adding storage into Azure allows us to connect to that storage, whether it's from on-premises computers or servers, or, if your users connect into Azure directly or through a VPN tunnel, then they can access this storage there, just like they could from a file share server that would be on premises. Now, of course, it's going to cost more money to store this data up in Azure. So you have several options such as using hard disk drives, SSDs for faster service, and the amount of storage that you pick. All these different things will add up to either more or less money based on your decisions here. And the last area that I really want to focus on, it doesn't mean that this is going to be the only three that you'll ever use, but these are the three you have to know, is going to be virtual machines. And just like Hyper-V in Windows Server, when you create a virtual machine inside Azure, it's also using Hyper-V, but inside the Azure Cloud. So I'll select Virtual machines, and here's where you would create a virtual machine. So you create an Azure virtual machine. You can also set this up a little bit more quickly with some preset configurations, and you also have some additional VM and related solutions. So if I do choose to create that virtual machine, then I have to answer a series of questions. What type of processor do I want? How much storage do I want? What type of storage I want, various different things. Also, which resource group, resource groups are basically just to organize where you're going to put your resources. And take a look at the bottom where it says image. If I hit the dropdown on that, you can see you can create not only Windows servers, but you can also create Ubuntu, as well as Oracle, Red Hat, Debian, and all different types of Linux virtual machines. I'm going to cancel this area because I want to show you an area that you can use to practice while you're studying to be a SysAdmin, or in case you're a new SysAdmin and you just haven't used Azure yet. Go to the search resources and type the word free. There's a lot of free services that are available to anyone with an Azure account. We can create Windows/Linux virtual machines, storage, AI plus machine learning, lots of different areas that you might find interesting and helpful for your SysAdmin career. So I'm going to go and choose one of these and show you how to set something up. I'm going to choose to create a Windows virtual machine. It's the same type of virtual machine I would've created in the paid section, but you don't get quite as many options and you don't get as many resources. You're not going to get as much RAM or high-end CPU or that kind of thing. So I'm going to choose a resource group. Now, I've created a lot of different projects over the years, so I could just choose any one of these groups, but if it's a free resource, it has to have nothing currently in it. So I'm going to choose to create a new one, and I'll just call this one LILTest and click OK. Now, I'll give it a virtual machine name. Make sure you click on this little information bubble because it tells you how you can name it. It has several rules such as you're not going to use any type of uppercase letters, so it's going to also not be able to contain certain characters, things like that. So I'll just go ahead and call this one liltestvm. I can't have any spaces in it either. And it can't be one that I've used before. So lots of rules when creating the virtual machine name. You also want to choose the region that's closest to you. I've gone ahead and chosen US West 2. And now you can see a limited amount of virtual machine types that you can create, along with the size options. Now, it shows $10.51 a month, but this is a free type of virtual machine, so you don't have to worry about any cost in this case. Now, I'm going to choose a username. Now, you cannot choose the username of administrator, but I'll choose winadmin, which is a pretty easy one to remember. And you can take a look at some of the rules here off to the right, and it matches everything that we need. Now, I'll go ahead and enter password twice, and I'll scroll down. Here's the area where you can allow access. You can either choose no access, and then you can go ahead and create a VPN tunnel or go through what's called a bastion server. But that takes a lot of extra effort just for a test. So I'm going to allow remote desktop to get into my virtual machine. And Tags is really about billing, and this is the demo, we don't have to worry about that. And now, we'll go ahead and choose to create it. And once again, you can ignore the cost that you see that shows up. Here, you can see the deployment in progress and look at all the different resources it creates. So it's creating the network virtualization. It's going to create the virtual hard drive and the virtual machine itself, the IP address that goes along with it. All these different things are going to pop up until it's done, and then you can go and manage that resource. In this case, the virtual machine. And here I can see that my resource has been created. So I'll click on Go to resource, and it will open up my new virtual machine. By default, the virtual machine is already started, so if I want, I can restart it or I can stop it. And here you can see the public IP address. So I can copy that if I'd like and open up remote desktop session and log into it. So I've gone ahead and copied it. Now I'm going to go and type in remote desktop, and I'll open up the application to the connection. Now I'm going to paste in that IP address I just copied and Connect. Now I've typed in my win admin name and password I created during the creation of the virtual machine, and I'll click OK. And now I'll choose to connect. And now I'm connecting for the first time in my brand-new Azure virtual machine. In this case, I did not choose a virtual machine with the graphical user interface or the desktop experience, so it automatically installed the core version. So the next thing that happened is it ran SConfig, which is server configuration. And now I can configure my server the same way I would if I had a graphical user interface, but I would do it all through command prompt. Our virtual machine is now complete, and I can connect to it using remote desktop whenever I need to. I recommend you learn as many new Azure services as you can to prepare you for a successful career as a SysAdmin.