What DNS Name Label should I give my Azure Virtual Machine?

Question

In my ongoing effort to wrap my head around Azure's new Resource Group model (see previous questions here and here), I am now trying to create a new Virtual Machine that will be used as a web server.

I have thee questions:

Question One:

Assuming I eventually want this VM to host the website woodswild.com, what DNS Name Label should I give this VM? Does it matter? All I know for sure is that it needs to be globally unique. Does it need to reflect the domain I want to host (woodswild.com)?

Question Two:

Do I even need to set the DNS name at all?

Question Three:

And, now that I've already created it, can I still change the DNS Name Label from "none" to something? And if so, how?

Answer 1

There is no requirement at all to either have a DNS name, or to have one that is anything to do with what you are setting up. I have a script that I use that creates one from a GUID!

This follows the usual process of assigning a setting to Azure.

1. Get-something, assign it to a variable.
2. Change a property of that variable, by assigning some other value.
3. Write the change to Azure using the Set-something cmdlet.

in this case it is a little complicated since the ultimate structure we want looks like this

"dnsSettings": {
   "domainNameLabel": "mytestdnsname",
   "fqdn": "mytestdnsname.westeurope.cloudapp.azure.com"
  }

Presuming we created a PIP like this

New-AzureRmPublicIpAddress -Name test01PIP -ResourceGroupName test -AllocationMethod Dynamic -Location westeurope  

The fully qualified domain name is set automatically, so we just need to set the DomainNameLabel which we do like this,

$ip = Get-AzureRmPublicIpAddress -Name test01PIP -ResourceGroupName test01[1] 
$ip.DnsSettings += @{DomainNameLabel = "mytestdnsname"}                   [2]
Set-AzureRmPublicIpAddress -PublicIpAddress $ip                           [3]

Answer 2

The name does not matter for your future planing to run a website on it. At this point you can use it to access the machine yourself. And in the end the machine will endup behind a loadbalancer. So the name is only for your internal use to find it beside it ip address.