> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://codeisahighway.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How to create and deploy a development machine on Azure using Azure Resource Manager template in Visual Studio - URL: https://codeisahighway.com/how-to-create-and-deploy-a-development-machine-on-azure-using-azure-resource-manager-template-in-visual-studio/ - Published: 2015-07-07T12:22:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-31T19:44:52.000Z - Author: Stephane Lapointe - Tags: DevOps, Automation, Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft Azure, Azure Resource Manager, HowTo, #Import 2023-07-11 16:44, #Import 2026-09-04 10:31, #Import 2026-09-04 13:56 Azure Resource manager have been around for a while now and it made provisioning quite easy and convenient. A couple of persons have asked me how to create and manage development machines when I speak about dev/tests environment in Azure, I'll explain you one way of doing this. If you follow this step by step guide, at the end, you'll get a development box running Visual Studio 2015 community edition. Your VM will be running on Azure Premium Storage. > We'll use a premium storage account in our VM template. It is not that expensive for a 127GB disk and we'll have greater performance compared with standard storage. ## Pre-requisites - An Azure subscription - Visual Studio 2015 and Azure SDK 2.6 or later > This article is not an introduction to Azure Resource Manager, if you need to catch up or learn on ARM, please see the *References* section at the end of the article. ## Steps to create and customize your ARM template ### Step 1 Launch Visual Studio 2015 and create a new *Azure Resource Group Project*. ![Create Azure Resource Group project](https://codeisahighway.com/content/images/2015/07/NewResourceGroupProject.png) ### Step 2 Choose the *Windows Virtual Machine template* and click OK ![ARM Windows virtual machine template](https://codeisahighway.com/content/images/2015/07/ChooseWindowsVirtualMachineTemplate.png) This will create you a project in Visual Studio with a couple of files. The most important files are the one under the *Templates* folder, your deployment template and deployment parameters files. ![Files created by Azure Resource Group project](https://codeisahighway.com/content/images/2015/07/AfterARMProjectCreation.png) ### Step 3 Open the template file named: *WindowsVirtualMachine.json* ### Step 4 Locate the *windowsOSVersion* parameter and replace the whole parameter with the following: ```json "imageSku": { "type": "string", "defaultValue": "VS-2015-Community-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2", "allowedValues": [ "VS-2015-Community-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2", "VS-2015-Enterprise-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2" ], "metadata": { "description": "The Visual Studio version for the VM. This will pick a fully patched image of this Visual Studio version. Allowed values: VS-2015-Community-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2, VS-2015-Enterprise-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2." } } ``` Add the following parameter at the end of the parameters section: ``` "resourcesLocation": { "type": "string", "defaultValue": "East US 2", "allowedValues": [ "West US", "East US 2", "West Europe", "East China", "Southeast Asia", "West Japan", "Australia East" ], "metadata": { "description": "The location of resources created in this template. Default value is East US 2." } } ``` ### Step 5 Change the values of the following variables: ```json "vmName": "MyDevBoxVM" "location": "[parameters('resourcesLocation')]" "OSDiskName": "osdisk-devbox" "imageOffer": "VisualStudio" "imagePublisher": "MicrosoftVisualStudio" "nicName": "devBoxNic" "publicIPAddressName": "devBoxPublicIP" "storageAccountType": "Premium_LRS" "vmName": "MyVS2015DevBoxVM" "vmSize": "Standard_DS2" ``` The important changes to understand in the variables above are: - **imagePublisher**: We changed this because we want to use the Visual Studio images instead of Windows images - **ImageOffer**: Again, we want to use a Visual Studio image offering - **storageAccountType**: We use a premium storage account instead of a regular storage account - **vmSize**: We need to use a DS serie VM, only them at the moment support premium storage. - **location**: At the time of writing this article (July 2015), Premium Storage is not available in all Azure locations, see *Important Things to Know About Premium Storage* in *References* section for more information. ### Step 6 Replace the *imageReference* section of the virtual machine resource with the following: ```json "imageReference": { "publisher": "[variables('imagePublisher')]", "offer": "[variables('imageOffer')]", "sku": "[parameters('imageSku')]", "version": "latest" } ``` ### Resulting template You should end up with the following result for your template: ```json { "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#", "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0", "parameters": { "adminPassword": { "metadata": { "description": "Password for the Virtual Machine." }, "type": "securestring" }, "adminUsername": { "metadata": { "description": "Username for the Virtual Machine." }, "type": "string" }, "dnsNameForPublicIP": { "metadata": { "description": "Unique DNS Name for the Public IP used to access the Virtual Machine." }, "type": "string" }, "imageSku": { "allowedValues": [ "VS-2015-Community-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2", "VS-2015-Enterprise-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2" ], "defaultValue": "VS-2015-Community-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2", "metadata": { "description": "The Visual Studio version for the VM. This will pick a fully patched image of this Visual Studio version. Allowed values: VS-2015-Community-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2, VS-2015-Enterprise-AzureSDK-2.7-WS2012R2." }, "type": "string" }, "newStorageAccountName": { "metadata": { "description": "Unique DNS Name for the Storage Account where the Virtual Machine's disks will be placed." }, "type": "string" }, "resourcesLocation": { "allowedValues": [ "West US", "East US 2", "West Europe", "East China", "Southeast Asia", "West Japan", "Australia East" ], "defaultValue": "East US 2", "metadata": { "description": "The location of resources created in this template. Default value is East US 2." }, "type": "string" } }, "resources": [ { "apiVersion": "2015-05-01-preview", "location": "[variables('location')]", "name": "[parameters('newStorageAccountName')]", "properties": { "accountType": "[variables('storageAccountType')]" }, "tags": { "displayName": "StorageAccount" }, "type": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts" }, { "apiVersion": "2015-05-01-preview", "location": "[variables('location')]", "name": "[variables('publicIPAddressName')]", "properties": { "dnsSettings": { "domainNameLabel": "[parameters('dnsNameForPublicIP')]" }, "publicIPAllocationMethod": "[variables('publicIPAddressType')]" }, "tags": { "displayName": "PublicIPAddress" }, "type": "Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses" }, { "apiVersion": "2015-05-01-preview", "location": "[variables('location')]", "name": "[variables('virtualNetworkName')]", "properties": { "addressSpace": { "addressPrefixes": [ "[variables('addressPrefix')]" ] }, "subnets": [ { "name": "[variables('subnetName')]", "properties": { "addressPrefix": "[variables('subnetPrefix')]" } } ] }, "tags": { "displayName": "VirtualNetwork" }, "type": "Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks" }, { "apiVersion": "2015-05-01-preview", "dependsOn": [ "[concat('Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses/', variables('publicIPAddressName'))]", "[concat('Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/', variables('virtualNetworkName'))]" ], "location": "[variables('location')]", "name": "[variables('nicName')]", "properties": { "ipConfigurations": [ { "name": "ipconfig1", "properties": { "privateIPAllocationMethod": "Dynamic", "publicIPAddress": { "id": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses',variables('publicIPAddressName'))]" }, "subnet": { "id": "[variables('subnetRef')]" } } } ] }, "tags": { "displayName": "NetworkInterface" }, "type": "Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces" }, { "apiVersion": "2015-05-01-preview", "dependsOn": [ "[concat('Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/', parameters('newStorageAccountName'))]", "[concat('Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces/', variables('nicName'))]" ], "location": "[variables('location')]", "name": "[variables('vmName')]", "properties": { "hardwareProfile": { "vmSize": "[variables('vmSize')]" }, "networkProfile": { "networkInterfaces": [ { "id": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces',variables('nicName'))]" } ] }, "osProfile": { "adminPassword": "[parameters('adminPassword')]", "adminUsername": "[parameters('adminUsername')]", "computername": "[variables('vmName')]" }, "storageProfile": { "imageReference": { "offer": "[variables('imageOffer')]", "publisher": "[variables('imagePublisher')]", "sku": "[parameters('imageSku')]", "version": "latest" }, "osDisk": { "caching": "ReadWrite", "createOption": "FromImage", "name": "osdisk", "vhd": { "uri": "[concat('http://',parameters('newStorageAccountName'),'.blob.core.windows.net/',variables('vmStorageAccountContainerName'),'/',variables('OSDiskName'),'.vhd')]" } } } }, "tags": { "displayName": "VirtualMachine" }, "type": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines" } ], "variables": { "OSDiskName": "osdisk-devbox", "addressPrefix": "10.0.0.0/16", "imageOffer": "VisualStudio", "imagePublisher": "MicrosoftVisualStudio", "location": "[parameters('resourcesLocation')]", "nicName": "devBoxNic", "publicIPAddressName": "devBoxPublicIP", "publicIPAddressType": "Dynamic", "storageAccountType": "Premium_LRS", "subnetName": "Subnet", "subnetPrefix": "10.0.0.0/24", "subnetRef": "[concat(variables('vnetID'),'/subnets/',variables('subnetName'))]", "virtualNetworkName": "MyVNET", "vmName": "MyDevBoxVM", "vmSize": "Standard_DS2", "vmStorageAccountContainerName": "vhds", "vnetID": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks',variables('virtualNetworkName'))]" } } ``` ### Step 8 Right-click your project node in Visual studio and choose *Deploy* / *New Deployment...* ![New ARM template deployment from Visual Studio](https://codeisahighway.com/content/images/2015/07/NewTemplateDeploymentFromVS.png) - Choose your Azure subscription - Select and existing or a create a new resource group. (**Ensure your resource group location support Premium storage**) ![Create resource group](https://codeisahighway.com/content/images/2015/07/CreateResourceGroup.png) ![Deploy to Resource group dialog](https://codeisahighway.com/content/images/2015/07/DeployToResourceGroupDialog.png) - Click Deploy You'll get prompted for parameters values, specially the *adminPassword* if you don't click the "save passwords" checkbox. - Enter the information and click save. > Pay special attention to the format you use for the dnsNameForPublicIP and newStorageAccountName parameters. **They need to be alphanumeric only and lowercase** ![Deployment parameters](https://codeisahighway.com/content/images/2015/07/DeploymentParameters.png) In 4-8 minutes, you'll get a development machine on Azure! Have fun developing in the cloud! [Download the Visual Studio 2015 project](https://github.com/slapointe/BlogSamples/blob/master/ARM-DevelopmentMachine/?ref=codeisahighway.com) ## References - [Azure - Free one-month trial](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/?ref=codeisahighway.com) - [Azure Resource Manager Overview](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-overview/?ref=codeisahighway.com) - [Premium storage](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/premium-storage/?ref=codeisahighway.com) - [Important Things to Know About Premium Storage](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-premium-storage-preview-portal/?ref=codeisahighway.com#important-things-to-know-about-premium-storage) - [Microsoft Azure PowerShell](https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/releases?ref=codeisahighway.com)