How to create Virtual Machine in Azure Free Services without cost - azure

Azure says here that
750 Hours of B1S VM and 64 GB X 2 Managed Disks, 2 P6 SDDs
and some others are free each month for 12 months.
On VM create in Azure Portal, There are Basics, Disks and other tabs, In Basics, I could able to select Image Size to B1S VM but in Disks tab, there is no option to select Managed Disk of 64GB of P6 SDDs.
There are only three options i.e Premium SSD, Standard SSD, Standard HDD. Whatever I select and proceed further, VM takes default of 128 GB C Drive and 4 GB of Temp Drive and starts billing.
Where can I select that free 64 GB X 2 Managed Disks, 2 P6 SDDs.?

Just hover mouse over "create" in the virtual machines tab in menu. That will show a "free VM" option. Click that and it configures everything required for a free VM.

In Azure Portal use the search square box (on top) and look for "Free Services" then you will be able to use free VM and other services.

I don't think you can change disk os disk size at all (only increase it), but there are Windows images called smalldisk; those have 30gb disk. You can use those, they should work just fine.

After making the VM, open the resource group of the vm. Click the disk of the vm (Be sure that the VM is to be switched off, else it won't work) and select the disk. Open the disk and on the sidebar click size and performance and resize the disk to p6.

I think VM creation is not completely free. You have to pay for computing power and disk. Please response if I am wrong.

Related

How to identify drive of Azure Virtual Machine with how it is shown at Azure Portal?

I am trying to identify which drive matches from Azure Virtual Machine with what is shown on the Azure Portal site.
I am trying to increase the size of one drive (H:\ drive) in VM from Azure Portal site.
This is how it shows up in VM:
This is how it shows up in Azure Portal site:
Where do I go about finding the right one to upgrade (from Azure Portal site)?
Currently, H:\ drive has 2 TB for the capacity, and I am trying to increase to 4 TB.
Modified/Added this later (after I got the feedback):
Modified/Added this later (after I got the feedback):
Thanks.
I tried to reproduce the same in my environment to identify which drive matches from Azure Virtual Machine
I have created azure virtual machine and attached a new disk like below.
In Disk management to make understand on your disk -> right click -> properties -> you can see LUN number -> in my case LUN8 is represent as disk 5
My disk 4 is identify in E drive as LUN 7
Now in disk click on virtual disk. suppose You want to increase size of azure8 (my disk name)
If you click on 5 -> 5 is represent as disk 5 (G)drive as location on LUN 8 in my portal LUN 8 is azure8 disk name this way u can identify which drive is represent on which disk
Additionally, To note the drives while allocating volume I have added to remember 2s for disk2 for particular LUN
The following solution might help you with finding out which LUN number correlates to your 'H' partition. It is not very optimized but after a quick test should yield the desired result.
The commands are:
Get-Disk
Get-Partition -DiskNumber 2
$mydisk = Get-Disk 2
$mydisk.Location
The output should provide the LUN. DiskNumber 2 was arbitrarily chosen and you might have to try all disk numbers provided by "Get-Disk" to obtain the disk with the correct partition (or of course use some other method).
See the image below for my results:
This MS Learn article provides more information about the commands.
Hopefully this helps.
Kind regards

Azure will not let me swap to my new smaller OS disk

Good Morning, Fellow Stack Overflow-ers,
I have a Windows 2019 DC Virtual Machine with a 127GiB OS Disk with MS Azure. The WM image is Standard B2s (2 vcpus, 4 GiB memory)
I want to swap this with a smaller 8GiB OS disk - having successfully created this in my portal and labelled useastOS - Azure is failing to allow me to swap from the previous 127GiB disk to the smaller 8GiB Disk. On the "Swap OS Disk" menu illustrated, you will see there is no option to use the useastOS disk.
Puzzling.
This is a managed disk and so there is no reason whatsoever as to why Azure is not giving me the option.
So my question is there any valid reason as to why Azure is not allowing me to swap to the smaller useastOS or is this bug within Azure that I need to make Azure aware of?
When you are creating a Managed Disk like this, there is no SO installed, it is an empty disk, that's why Azure assumes it is a data disk, not a SO disk.
Now, when you upload your VHD disk to blob storage, you can tell Azure that this disk is OS and not a data disk like this.
Looking for upload VHD to Azure blob, here it is an example https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/prepare-for-upload-vhd-image.
Your question is how to swap SO disk to a new one smaller, this is what I understood, in case you just want to add a second disk as a data disk, you can go to VM overview, from blade disk, you can add it easily.
Anyway, I hope that I could help in any :)
Just in case, confirm that you selected an operation system when you created this disk useastOS. For example, in my case it is Windows, but disk can be either Windows or Linux, when you don't select anything, Azure assumes it is a data disk, not an operation system.

What is the smallest vm available in azure?

I'm interested in creating a VM in Azure and downloading to my own machine to use in Hyper-V. The past couple of attempts at creating a VM have resulted in a 127Gb image. Can anyone tell me what the absolute smallest windows vm available is and how I can choose this in set up. There doesn't seem to be any options for anything smaller than this.
You can use windows vms labeled as smalldisk, those will have 30gb os disk size. any linux vm will have 30gb os disk by default.
if using non portal, you can specify os disk size, I didnt ever try to downsize it below 30, but cant imagine why it wont work (unless there isn't enough space on the disk).
Azure recently announced new B-series VM size, B1ls, which has the smallest memory and lowest cost among Azure VM instances. This offering is in response to customers who were looking for entry-level offerings. B1ls has 512 MiB of memory and 1 vCPU, and it costs only $0.0052 (US East) per hour.
B1ls is available only on Linux.
Reference: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/b-series-update-b1ls-is-now-available/

What are the data disks used for?

I need to know the difference between the SSD disk and the data disk. According to this capture, this virtual machine has a hard disk ssd 16gb, and 4 disks data. But these 4 disks, how much do they have? Are they ssd? what are they for?
enter image description here
data disks can be ssd or not, depending on how you set them up. they are used to store data :)
amount of data disks you can attach depends on the vm sku. you dont always have to attach 4 data disks (or whatever vm supports, you can have 0 - VM SKU maximum data disks).
The 16gb ssd is local ssd (local to the host machine hosting your vm) attached to the VM (not OS disk). its a temporary drive - meaning it can go away when you reboot vm, so content will be lost and you will get a new temporary drive. it can be used to store throw away logs, for example, or temporary files. IO operations on this disk do not count towards IO limit and this drive is completely free (you pay for the VM SKU and it is part of that cost).
you can learn about data disk prices here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/managed-disks/. Storage prices do not take into account os or data disks. they just bill you for storage.
reference:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/attach-managed-disk-portal
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/attach-disk-ps
It means in addition to the OS disk, you can connect 4 data disks to the VM.
It does not mean there are 4 disks, just that you can add 4 if you want.
You should discuss the VM requirements with your client. Maybe he needs an additional data disk, maybe not.
The capture you posted, specifies that this VM can take up to 4 data disks. The price does not include them. Also, you should check the Azure price calculator to generate more accurate offers.

How can I add memory to an Azure virtual machine?

Is it possible to add a "custom" size memory to an Azure virtual machine?
For example, I'm using the Medium size - 2 core, 4GB RAM, I would like to have 8GB RAM with the current settings I have... otherwise the next option available is A5 2 core with 14GB.
At https://portal.azure.com/ you can select the machine, then go to Size and pick another size for your virtual machine. It currently looks a bit like this:
If you scroll down see you a lot of different configurations, but you can't customize parameters of any of the given configurations.
See also How to: Change the Size of a Windows Azure Virtual Machine at MSDN.
Simple answer is you can't. You will need to pick up from one of the existing VM sizes.
Looks like Microsoft recently added a Large (A3) machine with 7GB
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/

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