The problem

Coming from my own vSphere engineering standpoint the public cloud makes things which I thought was easy difficult. After looking through some steps in order to basically “clone” a machine, I finally found a way to do this that is a bit easier though it does break some needed rules, and probably isn’t the safest process, but if your like me, it actually clones the machine

The process

To start out you need to snapshot the drive from a machine

1. From the portal go to the Virtual Machine you want to snapshot, and click “Disks”
2. From Disks click the OS disk for the machine
3. Now at the top click, “Create Snapshot”
4. Make sure to note the name and resource group as that’s the next steps. Click “Create”

Now that you have a snapshot you need to create a disk from that snapshot

1. From the portal home you will click on the “See all” from the Azure Services
2. From here go to “Disks”
3. Click ” + Add”
4. Select the Resource Group
5. Input the name
6. Click the “Source type”  and select “Snapshot”
7. Select your snapshot
8. For the drive make it the same size as the snapshot, and a “Standard HDD”
9. Create whatever tags you need
10. Create the drive

Now you should have the drive you need to create the machine.

1. From the portal home you will click on the “See all” from the Azure Services
2. From here go to “Disks”
3. Select the Disk and near the top select “Create VM”
4. From here on out create all the other needed options and create the VM. Dont change anything on the “Disk” field as its pulling the disk your deploying from.

Now the VM should build, and once done the drive is connected to the VM so it cannot be used again.

Log into the machine with your username/password from the origional machine(probably a good idea to change the password)

Enjoy!