Three seems to be a popular number in Windows Azure – three data center regions, three types of storage, three replicas of your storage maintained at all times, and three ways to deploy an application.

In past episodes of MSDN DevRadio, I covered Web and Worker roles (the Platform-as-a-Service model) as well as Windows Azure Web Sites. In this episode, the first of two parts, I’ll introduce you to Windows Azure Virtual Machines, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering in Windows Azure, by showing you how to provision a VM and install a simple web server and application on it.