Creating Virtual Machines

1. Planning Considerations
Storage: How much, where, and in what configuration
Disk: Sizing, persistence and caching.
Compute: Capacity required.
Availability: Uptime requirements, geo-distribution, service level agreements, and accessibility.
Cost: Azure services, such as storage and compute.
Azure pricing Online Pricing Calculator tool

2. Methods for Creating Virtual Machines
A. Create a Windows Virtual Machine with the Azure portal
B. Create a Windows virtual machine from an Azure Resource Manager template

• GitHub, Azure Quick Start Templates
• Understand the structure and syntax of Azure Resource Manager templates
• Azure Quickstart Templates

C. Create a Windows virtual machine with PowerShell
D. Build, manage, and deploy VMs with the Azure Tools for Visual Studio and the Azure SDK
E. Create a Linux virtual machine with the Azure CLI

3. No matter what method, these are the basic steps for deploying a virtual machine.
A. Select an image or disk to use for your new virtual machine.
B. Provide required information such as host name, user name, and password for the new virtual machine.
C. Provide optional information like domain membership, virtual networks, storage account, cloud service, and availability set.
D. Provision the machine.

4. Creating Virtual Machines from:
Creating Virtual Machines from the Marketplace
Alternative, you can upload a custom image from an on-premise virtual machine.
Steps to create Virtual Machines (using Custom Images)
On-Premise
1. Prepare the VM. Identify the virtual machine that you would like to use in Azure. Make sure the virtual machine has all the roles and features installed that you need. Run sysprep to prepare the machine.
2. Prepare the VM VHD. Locate the underlying VHD that the virtual machine is using. In Azure, you can only use generation 1 virtual machines that are in the VHD file format. There are utilities to convert VHDX and VMDK file formats to VHD.
Azure On-Premise
3. Create the Storage Container. You need a storage account in Azure to store the uploaded VM image. You can either use an existing storage account or create a new one.
4. Upload the VHD. Use the Add-AzureRmVhd cmdlet to upload the image to a container in your storage account.
5. Create a VM using the uploaded VHD.

Additional references
Manage Linux virtual machines from Windows environments using Bash on Windows
Bash on Windows on GitHub