A Tutorial: Setting Up Microsoft Azure for Test and Development Environments

Organizations today have many options when it comes to the deployment of their ERP systems.  And if you've weighed the pros of a cloud deployment, you have likely researched highly marketed platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, and how to best utilize them. Although we strongly recommend leveraging a private cloud environment for Microsoft Dynamics ERP and other applications with complex workloads and sensitive information, a public cloud like Microsoft Azure can provide availability above and beyond what can be achieved by deploying on premise. It can also be a practical solution for testing, software development, storage and disaster recovery.

With so much interest in utilizing Azure for development, disaster and other production purposes, we have encountered many questions about how to set up and test the platform.  To that end, we have developed the following tutorial on provisioning an Azure environment for a typical multi-tier application with a rich or web client.

What the tutorial covers:

We will deploy an Active Directory Domain Controller, a Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Server for the rich client, a SQL Database Server and a Web server for the Web Client.  The screen shots refer to Microsoft Dynamics GP as an example, however this tutorial can represent any multi-tier application. We'll also set up a private network for all servers to communicate on, and then restrict access directly from the internet for all servers except the RDS server. For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll assume you've already signed up either for the Azure Free Trial or you've purchased a subscription, so we will start at the Azure Portal.

In order for your virtual machines (VMs) to communicate with one another you'll need to create a virtual network (or VNet).  ...