Create a virtual machine and storage account for a scalable application

Article
05/11/2023

This tutorial is part one of a series. This tutorial shows you deploy an application that uploads and download large amounts of random data with an Azure storage account. When you're finished, you have a console application running on a virtual machine that you upload and download large amounts of data to a storage account.

In part one of the series, you learn how to:

Create a storage account
Create a virtual machine
Configure a custom script extension

If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin.

Note

We recommend that you use the Azure Az PowerShell module to interact with Azure. See Install Azure PowerShell to get started. To learn how to migrate to the Az PowerShell module, see Migrate Azure PowerShell from AzureRM to Az.

Azure Cloud Shell

Azure hosts Azure Cloud Shell, an interactive shell environment that you can use through your browser. You can use either Bash or PowerShell with Cloud Shell to work with Azure services. You can use the Cloud Shell preinstalled commands to run the code in this article, without having to install anything on your local environment.

To start Azure Cloud Shell:

Option	Example/Link
Select Try It in the upper-right corner of a code or command block. Selecting Try It doesn't automatically copy the code or command to Cloud Shell.
Go to https://shell.azure.com, or select the Launch Cloud Shell button to open Cloud Shell in your browser.
Select the Cloud Shell button on the menu bar at the upper right in the Azure portal.

To use Azure Cloud Shell:

Start Cloud Shell.
Select the Copy button on a code block (or command block) to copy the code or command.
Paste the code or command into the Cloud Shell session by selecting Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Linux, or by selecting Cmd+Shift+V on macOS.
Select Enter to run the code or command.

If you choose to install and use the PowerShell locally, this tutorial requires the Azure PowerShell module Az version 0.7 or later. Run Get-Module -ListAvailable Az to find the version. If you need to upgrade, see Install Azure PowerShell module. If you are running PowerShell locally, you also need to run Connect-AzAccount to create a connection with Azure.

Create a resource group

Create an Azure resource group with New-AzResourceGroup. A resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed.

New-AzResourceGroup -Name myResourceGroup -Location EastUS

Create a storage account

The sample uploads 50 large files to a blob container in an Azure Storage account. A storage account provides a unique namespace to store and access your Azure storage data objects. Create a storage account in the resource group you created by using the New-AzStorageAccount command.

In the following command, substitute your own globally unique name for the Blob storage account where you see the <blob_storage_account> placeholder.

$storageAccount = New-AzStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName myResourceGroup `
  -Name "<blob_storage_account>" `
  -Location EastUS `
  -SkuName Standard_LRS `
  -Kind Storage `
  -AllowBlobPublicAccess $false

Create a virtual machine

Create a virtual machine configuration. This configuration includes the settings that are used when deploying the virtual machine such as a virtual machine image, size, and authentication configuration. When running this step, you are prompted for credentials. The values that you enter are configured as the user name and password for the virtual machine.

Create the virtual machine with New-AzVM.

# Variables for common values
$resourceGroup = "myResourceGroup"
$location = "eastus"
$vmName = "myVM"

# Create user object
$cred = Get-Credential -Message "Enter a username and password for the virtual machine."

# Create a subnet configuration
$subnetConfig = New-AzVirtualNetworkSubnetConfig -Name mySubnet -AddressPrefix 192.168.1.0/24

# Create a virtual network
$vnet = New-AzVirtualNetwork -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location `
  -Name MYvNET -AddressPrefix 192.168.0.0/16 -Subnet $subnetConfig

# Create a public IP address and specify a DNS name
$pip = New-AzPublicIpAddress -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location `
  -Name "mypublicdns$(Get-Random)" -AllocationMethod Static -IdleTimeoutInMinutes 4

# Create a virtual network card and associate with public IP address
$nic = New-AzNetworkInterface -Name myNic -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location `
  -SubnetId $vnet.Subnets[0].Id -PublicIpAddressId $pip.Id

# Create a virtual machine configuration
$vmConfig = New-AzVMConfig -VMName myVM -VMSize Standard_DS14_v2 | `
    Set-AzVMOperatingSystem -Windows -ComputerName myVM -Credential $cred | `
    Set-AzVMSourceImage -PublisherName MicrosoftWindowsServer -Offer WindowsServer `
    -Skus 2016-Datacenter -Version latest | Add-AzVMNetworkInterface -Id $nic.Id

# Create a virtual machine
New-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location -VM $vmConfig

Write-host "Your public IP address is $($pip.IpAddress)"

Deploy configuration

For this tutorial, there are pre-requisites that must be installed on the virtual machine. The custom script extension is used to run a PowerShell script that completes the following tasks:

Install .NET core 2.0
Install chocolatey
Install GIT
Clone the sample repo
Restore NuGet packages
Creates 50 1-GB files with random data

Run the following cmdlet to finalize configuration of the virtual machine. This step takes 5-15 minutes to complete.

# Start a CustomScript extension to use a simple PowerShell script to install .NET core, dependencies, and pre-create the files to upload.
Set-AzVMCustomScriptExtension -ResourceGroupName myResourceGroup `
    -VMName myVM `
    -Location EastUS `
    -FileUri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/azure-samples/storage-dotnet-perf-scale-app/master/setup_env.ps1 `
    -Run 'setup_env.ps1' `
    -Name DemoScriptExtension

Next steps

In part one of the series, you learned about creating a storage account, deploying a virtual machine and configuring the virtual machine with the required pre-requisites such as how to:

Create a storage account
Create a virtual machine
Configure a custom script extension

Advance to part two of the series to upload large amounts of data to a storage account using exponential retry and parallelism.

Upload large amounts of large files in parallel to a storage account