Configuring and Deploying a VM using ARM Template

Configuration

Storage Account

Not needed but used to store boot diagnostics

Public IP

To be able to reach this VM from outside

Network Security Group

Block access to only allowed ports

Virtual Network

For virtual machine to run inside of

Network Interface (NIC)

IP addressing configuration for the VM

Virtual Machine

Virtual machine we are deploying

Creating the Template

Under resources we will type arm-vm-win and we will select the windows virtual machine option

This should populate a template with the components we specified previously such as storage account, public ip, network security group, virtual network, network interface, virtual machine

Things we are interested in changing from template

Storage Account

Name
Sku

Public IP

Change name
Set Public IP to either Static or Dynamic (changes every time we turn the VM on or off)

Change the dnsSettings > domainNameLabel, this will be the DNS name translation for the IP we get assigned

Network Security Group

Acts as a Firewall for the Virtual Network based on IP address and ports, it allows or blocks traffic depending on the rules configured.

Suggestion: change the sourceaddressprefix to your public IP address to only allow your IP to be able to RDP the VM and avoid attacks from malicious agents.

Virtual Network

The local network or LAN for your VM, a segmented localized network of your cloud were your VM is located.

The “dependsOn” parameter will check if those resources exist first! Before proceeding forward. In this case dependsOn will check if there is a network security group before continuing with the Virtual Network deployment.

AddressSpace>addressprefixes this is the address range for the virtual network
Subnet name
Sunned > addressprefixes this will be the range for the subnet
Networksecurity>id this is the network security group we want to apply for the subnet

Network Interface (or NIC)

This is the NIC we are attaching to our machine, so that it is able to get a private and public IP address.

Virtual Machine

Here we can specify anything pertaining to the virtual machine we want to deploy such as VM name, VM size, OS username and password, OS image we will use for the VM, OS Disk, network interface, diagnostics.

Deploying ARM template via Azure CLI

We can deploy our VM ARM template using powershell with Azure CLI

In this case my Azure CLI is already paired with my azure tenant so I can just deploy the template file with the parameters file using the following command.