PMA 60: Windows Cloud Server on Azure (15 pts extra)

What you need

Purpose

To set up Linux and Windows servers on Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform.

Creating an Microsoft Live Account

In a Web browser, go to: https://signup.live.com/ Create a new email address. Don't use a CCSF student email account. You will use this new Live account as your username for Azure for Students.

Creating an Azure for Students Account

In a Web browser, go to:

Azure for Students FAQ

Click the blue "Apply now" button.

Follow the on-screen instructions to make your account, using your Live account as your username.

You'll need your .edu email address and a phone, but no credit card.

You'll end up at the Azure Education Hub, as shown below.

Creating a Windows Virtual Machine

At the top left, click the three-bar "hamburger" icon.

Click "Virtual Machines", as shown below.

On the "Virtual machines" page, at the top left, click Add, "Virtual machine".

In the "Create a virtual machine" page, on the Basics tab, enter these values, as shown below.

At the bottom, click the blue "Review + create" button.

A warning appears, saying "You have set RDP port(s) open to the internet."

At the bottom, click the blue Create button.

After a few minutes, the deployment completes, as shown below.

At the bottom, click the blue "Go to resource" button.

You can see your IP address, as shown below.

Connect via RDP

Use an RDP client to connect to that IP address, using the name and password you selected.

Setup Auto-Shutdown

This is important, to avoid wasting your free trial money.

In the "Microsoft Azure" web portal, scroll to the left to see the "CreateVM..." page, as shown below.

Click "Setup auto-shutdown", outlined in red in the image below. Turn the feature on. Click Save.

PMA 60.1: Network Card (15 pts)

In your Windows 10 Azure machine, open a Command Prompt and execute this command: 
systeminfo
The flag is the name of the Network Card, covered by a green box in the image below.

Checking your Balance

To see how much of your credit is left, go to:

https://www.microsoftazuresponsorships.com/

One day after I made my cloud server, I checked my balance and saw that only one dollar had been expended, as shown below.

Monitoring

If you want to see how busy your machine is during a long job, scroll down to the lower pane on the win10 page to see the CPU usage, as shown below.

Posted 10-13-20
Expense image added 10-14-20
Minor updates 8-19-22
Explanation of the two email accounts improved 10-12-22
"Windows" added to title 1-31-23