I talked about building a CRM dev VM running on Windows Azure from scratch here.  However, you might have an existing VM that you’d prefer to run on Windows Azure instead.  Why?  Here are some reasons I can think of which may or may not apply to you:

• You can take advantage of better hardware.
• Even though I have a quad core 16 GB laptop, everything just feels like it runs faster in the Windows Azure VM.  Placebo effect?  Maybe.
• You can access your dev box from just about anywhere with a Windows PC and an internet connection.
• Windows Azure has better bandwidth than you might have.
• Run a speed test to compare…make sure you pick a test server closest to your Azure data center for accurate comparison

I am sure there are others.  Feel free to share in the comments.  To get started, you are going to have to upload your .vhd file to your Windows Azure Storage account.  To do this follow the instructions starting at Step 5 from the Creating and Uploading a Virtual Hard Disk that Contains the Windows Server Operating System right until the Upload the VHD file section.  Use the following command line switches for csupload instead (make you have the June 2012 Azure SDK):

csupload Add-Disk –Destination “<full blob url you want for your vhd>” –Label “<whatever you want>” –LiteralPath “<path to your local .vhd>” –OS Windows

After the upload completes, you should be able to go into the management portal, create a new VM using this vhd file.

@devkeydet