Prerequisite
Azure account, Azure subscription
This tutorial will not cover how to create an Azure account. When you sign up on Azure, you get some free credits to use for the first 30days as you accustom yourself with the platform.
Create your free account here.
Step 1
On your portal, click on Create a resource -> Under Virtual Machine, click on Create. You can also click on Virtual machines from your home and then click on create
Step 2 - Configure the VM (Virtual Machine)
In this step, specific configurations to watch out for are, Resource groups (a resource group is a collection of resources that share the same lifecycle, permissions, and policies). In this tutorial I am going to choose the default one provided by azure but you can create as many resource group as suits your subscriptions.
Next is to provide a valid Virtual machine name.
The next setting is to select a region where your VM is hosted. There are many important factors that influence the region to choose, from cost to government policies about data protection, certain countries don't allow their data to leave their physical geography. For this tutorial I have chosen US East.
The next configuration is Availability options/zone. I have chosen Availability zone from the option and marked only zone1 for the availability zone. The more zones you mark, the more your VM is replicated to create redundancy which in turn can be helpful when any one of your VM goes down due to any accident at the data center. Note that the more redundancy, the higher the cost.
For the security type, I have chosen Trusted launch virtual machines, you can explore the other options to see what suits your need.
Select an image
Under the image options, select Windows 11 Pro as that is the goal of this tutorial.
Under Virtual machine architecture, select x64.
Under size, I have chosen the least expensive Standard_B1s option with 1GiB of memory and 1vcpu just for the sake of this tutorial but you are free to explore other options that cater for your need. The memory and cpu of a machine determines its performance, the larger the memory and cpu, the better the performance.
Configure your password by making sure you enter a combination of secure characters (you can ask your browser to suggest a secure password for you but remember to save it.
Under Public inbound ports, select Allow selected and choose RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), you can also select the http/https ports if you intend to connect to your machine via a web application using APIs.
Click on Next to proceed.
Disk Setting
Select your disk size (storage) and disk type. I have selected 127G and Standard SSD respectively. You can choose to attach a new disk, but we won't be doing that for the sake of this tutorial. Disks mainly serve the purpose of storage in most cases. In a physical windows computer, one can also choose to partition the available disk to be able to use them for different purposes such as running different OS (operating systems) or just for backup.
Leave the Key management as platform-managed.
Click on Next to proceed.
Under Networking, Management, Monitoring, Advanced, Tags, we will leave all the options as the default provided by azure. You can explore them depending on your needs.
Click on Review+Create and wait for the VM to be created. Once complete you will be presented with the screen below. Click on Go to resource
Click on Connect
Click on Download RDP file
If you are using a Mac just like me, you will need a third-party program to open your .rdp file.
In my case I downloaded Microsoft Remote Desktop from App Store to open the file.
Locate the file in the download folder and click to open it. Provide the username and password you set up when creating the VM.
When prompted with this insecure connection warning, ignore and click on continue.
After providing the username and password correctly, you should see your VM booting up.
Choose your preferred privacy setting and click on Accept
Voila! You have your Windows 11 VM
Who said you can't use windows in Mac 😁.
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