Cloning Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines are still new to everyone, and I got a great question from a partner a few days ago: “I have an Azure Virtual Machine set up just the way I want it, now I want to spin up multiple instances, how do I do that?”

In the “picture is worth 1,000 words” category (and I don’t have time to write 1,000 words ), please see the following sequence of screen shots for the answer.

Things to note:

• run sysprep (%windir%\system32\sysprep) with “generalize” so each machine will have a unique SID (security ID)
• when you “capture” the VM, it will be deleted. You can re-create it from the image as shown below