This is the first in a series of posts about setting up and configuring an Azure virtual machine for use as a development box for Embarcadero’s RADStudio 10.2 Tokyo.

In this blog post I will explain the steps necessary for setting up an Azure virtual machine for use with RADStudio linux development. To begin with you need to have an account with Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. You can get a free trial for Azure by going to the Azure website and clicking the Free Trial link. Once you have an Azure account, and you are logged into it, you are ready to setup your Azure virtual machine for use with RADStudio 10.2 Tokyo.

 

Create Your Azure Virtual Machine

The first step is to click on the New link in the left-hand navigation menu. This will open the New pane in the Azure management portal. The new pane contains many different types of Azure components/modules you can create.

From the New pane select the Compute link. This will bring up all of the Compute options available to you with Microsoft Azure. Scroll down until you locate the Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS object and select it. This will open up a pane for creating a new Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS virtual machine. At the bottom of the pane you will find a Create button.

Click on the Create button to start the Create virtual machine wizard. The first page of the wizard prompts you for basic information such as name, disk type, authentication info, etc.

1. Enter the name you wish for the virtual machine to have into the Name field.
2. You can select either SSD or HDD for the disk type. I recommend selecting the HDD option as it is cheaper and you don’t really need the speed of an SSD for your development vm.
3. Enter the name for your administration user into the User name field.
4. Next you need to select an authentication type. You can choose either SSH public key or Password. To keep things simple I selected Password for this tutorial.
5. Once you have selected the Password option you will be prompted for your Password and Confirm password. Make sure you enter the same password into both boxes.
6. You need to have a resource group  to contain your new virtual machine so make sure Create new is selected and enter a name for your resource group into the field below the radio buttons.
   
7. The final option for the basic information page is to select a location. Ideally you want to select the location that is nearest to you. In my case I selected East US.
8. Once all of the basic information is entered click the OK button.

The next page of the wizard is the Size page. On this page you will select the size of the virtual machine you wish to create. Azure will recommend some different size options for you. If you don’t see a recommendation that works for you click the View all link to get a complete list. After you select the size of the virtual machine, you need to click the Select button.

The next page will prompt you for virtual machine settings. For the most part you can leave these settings at their defaults. The only recommendation I have is that you modify the Public IP address settings. To do this you need to click on the arrow next to the Public IP address box. Two panes will open up. In the far right one, titled Create public IP address, select the Static assignment option. You will then click the OK button in that pane.

When you are done changing your settings you need to click the OK button in the Settings pane. That will take you to the final wizard page (titled Summary). Check the summary to make sure that everything is set the way you want it. If everything is fine click the summary pane’s OK button. Azure will take you to your dashboard and go through the process of creating your virtual machine. Please be patient as it will take a while to complete this process. When the virtual machine is done being created the dashboard will display a box with the name of the virtual machine and it will show its status as running.

Once the virtual machine is running you will need to click the dashboard box representing your virtual machine. That will take you to the resources page for your virtual machine. Take note of the public IP address listed as you will need it in the next step.

 

Well, that’s it for this post. Please visit again soon when we continue with how to configure and install the necessary packages and services in your brand new Azure Linux virtual machine so you can start developing Linux server apps with Embarcadero’s excellent RADStudio 10.2 Tokyo development suite.

 

Check out the next post in this series: Setup an Azure VM for RadStudio 10.2 Linux Development (Part 2)