0.1 Windows VMs on GCP
Now let's do a lab activity. We'll show how easy it is to start and use your first Windows Virtual Machine in Google Cloud platform. In this demo, we'll create a new project on Google Cloud platform, provision a Windows Virtual Machine and Google Compute Engine then access using Remote Desktop protocol. You can see that I've already logged in to Google Cloud platform using my Google account. I'm looking at the Cloud Console. This is a simple and easy to use browser based user interface for accessing Google Cloud platform resources such as virtual machines. On GCP, all resources must be created in a project. The project serves as a container for billing and security purposes. So first, I'll create a project by clicking on the Create Project button. Now I'm looking at the new project form. I'll just enter a project name. For this demo I'll name the project Windows Workloads Demo. You should see that a project ID has been created based on my project name, but with lowercase letters and dashes replacing uppercase letters and spaces. Next I'll click Create, and the project will be created. I'll pause the video for a few seconds while the project spins up. Okay, we're back. Now our project is up and running, it's time to take a look around. I'll select the project and then navigate to the project's home page using the products and services menu. This provides a convenient location to look up all the resources you're working with inside your project. The products and services menu provides an easy to use and convenient interface that lets you access all of the products and services on the platform. Notice how they're organized into product families, so we have Compute, Storage, Stack Driver, Tools, Big Data, and Machine Learning. As this demo is focused on Windows workloads, we're going to provision a Windows Virtual Machine. In order to do this, we'll make use of Google Compute Engine. On GCP, Compute Engine is the infrastructure as a service product that allows us to provision virtual machines with a wide variety of configurations. So, I'll select Compute Engine, and you can see that the Compute Engine API is just getting ready. This will take a few seconds, and I'll pause the video while this happens. Okay, we're back again. Now I can create a virtual machine. In the console, I do this by clicking on the Create button. Now we're looking at the create an instance form. There are lots of options to configure. But for now, I'll just modify one to change the boot disk to make use of a Windows Server 2016 image. I'll select the image then scroll to the bottom of the form, click Create, and we're done. In just a few seconds our virtual machine will be ready. I'll pause the video while we do this. Okay, now the VM is ready. To access Windows Virtual Machines on Compute Engine, we'll need to perform a couple of simple operational tasks. First we need to set a password, which we can do by clicking on the menu, and then selecting create or reset Windows password. On this form we'll hit the Set button and then our password will be displayed. We'll need to keep a safe record of this for our own use. I paused the video just before the password was displayed, and copied it to my clipboard. Now I can use it to RDP into the machine. And to do this, I'm going to make use of a Chrome extension. You can also use any other RDP client. So click on RDP. You'll notice that the Chrome extension is loading. Simply enter the password, click on OK. We'll have to just click Continue because the certificate hasn't been registered onto my local machine. And we'll be in. You can see that it's a completely standard Windows user interface. I can store whatever software I like onto this machine. That completes this demo. We've created a Google Cloud platform project, enabled the Compute Engine API, provisioned a Windows Virtual Machine, then connected to it using RDP.