Windows Azure Virtual Machines provide the capability of hosting your virtualized environment in Microsoft’s data center. For fast computational workloads, quick development and testing, or frequent stopping and starting, when deploying Virtual Machines in Azure, you will pay only for your usage. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering provides multiple possibilities like elasticity (scaling up or scaling down your hardware resources as required), high availability of your storage media (depends on the type of workload) and scalability options.

With a virtual machine in Azure, you can:

• Deploy available versions of Windows Server or distributions of Linux operating systems by choosing from preconfigured images. Or, you can upload a virtual hard disk (VHD) that contains a server operating system and then use it to create virtual machines.
• Create and connect multiple virtual machines so you can load balance traffic among them.
• Use both automated and manual ways to create, manage, and delete a virtual machine. You can use the web portal (Azure Management Portal), cmdlets for Windows PowerShell, or the Service Management APIs.
• Delete and recreate it whenever you need to, like you can with any other virtual machine.

In this page, you will find the key resources required to configure and run SQL Server workloads on Azure Virtual Machines.

Configuring the Azure VM for SQL Server connectivity – This post talks about how to configure connectivity for an Azure Virtual Machine running a SQL Server instance.

Creating a Client VM on Azure for testing – If you need to simulate workload from a client virtual machine, then this post will help you setup a client machine.

Setting up SQL Server on Azure for testing – This post talks about provisioning a virtual machine with a default instance of SQL Server running on it.

Whitepapers and useful references

Performance Best Practices for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn133149.aspx 

Performance Guidance for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn248436.aspx