The last two posts covered Building a VPC Environment and Running it for the First Time. Today we’re going to put the final touches on our VPC and make it worthy of any development enviornment.
First, we’ll starty by creating a new differencing disk – name it AzureBase.vhd. Base it off of the XXX_Base.vhd disk image we created on Day 2.
Bring up the Virtual PC Dashboard and point the Azure VMC to use the newly created differencing disk.
Next we need to install our Azure software.
- Install Azure SDK
- Install Toolkit
- Install Training Kit
Mark the AzureBase.vhd disk image read-only.
Create a differencing disk – name it AzureDev.vhd. Base it off of the AzureBase.vhs disk image.
Bring up the Virtual PC Dashboard and re-Point the Azure VMC to use the newly created differencing disk.
You now have a stable development environment.
Why did we go through all this trouble to create a development environment? When the next Azure Beta comes out, you can start at the 2nd disk image and have a full working environment up and running rather quickly.
What about the 3rd differencing disk…that seems kind of pointless. Well, If you make any changes that break your environment, you only need to recreate the 3rd virtual disk to be back in business. You could use the Undo feature and work of off the 2nd disk, but then you would lose any progress when you undo the changes. Plus the differencing disk seems to work slightly faster than using Undo disks.
