Creating and configuring a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure

For the knife azure plugin to communicate with Azure's REST API, we need to provide information to knife regarding our Azure account and credentials:

1. Sign in into the Azure portal and download a publish-settings file by visiting  https://manage.windowsazure.com/publishsettings/index?client=xplat .

2. Store it on a Chef workstation on the a local filesystem and refer to this local file by creating an entry in knife.rb:

   knife[:azure_publish_settings_file] = "~/<name>.publishsettings" 
   

   

3. Here are the parameters used to create a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure:

   Parameter	Value	Description
   --azure-dns-name	distechnodemo	DNS name
   --azure-vm-name	dtserver02	Virtual machine name
   --azure-vm-size	Small	Virtual machine size
   -N	DevOpsVMonAzure2	Name of the Chef node
   --azure-storage-account	classicstorage9883	Azure storage account
   --bootstrap-protocol	cloud-api	Bootstrap protocol
   ...