Installing the System

Before you begin, you must learn about Azure and installing the Azure CLI. Learning about Azure provides links to important documentation. Ciena recommends using the Azure CLI to create and manage Azure resources.

Learning about Azure

To learn more about Azure, refer to the Azure documentation at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/.

Table 1. Links to important Azure documentation
Topic	Location
Virtual network	http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-overview/
Virtual network (detail)	http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-faq/
User defined routes	http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-udr-overview/
Network security group	http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-nsg

The Azure portal has limited support for managing virtual machines with multiple network interfaces, Ciena recommends using the Azure CLI.

Microsoft provides a cross-platform CLI for Azure, which is available at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/xplat-cli-install/ and can be installed on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

After you have installed the CLI, log in to your Azure account.

$ azure login

The Azure CLI has the following modes:

ASM is now deprecated. New deployments must use ARM instead. It is assumed for this guide that you have the Azure CLI set to the ARM mode.

To set the Azure CLI to the ARM mode, enter the following command:

$ azure config mode arm

The Azure CLI provides extensive help topics. To display the top-level help topics, enter the following command:

$ azure help

To display help information about a specific command, enter the following command:

azure help <command>