When creating virtual machines in Microsoft Azure, you’ll need to know which machine size and image to use (provided you’re not using your own uploaded custom image). Microsoft (and partners) did a great job in providing many pre-defined images for the IaaS platform, however not all images are available in all Azure regions. An image could be available in the South Central U.S location, but not in the “Japan East” region. The same applies to the VM sizes, for example, the Standard_NC6 size (backed by a Tesla K80 GPU) is only available in East U.S. and South Central U.S. locations, not in any of the other locations.
To check which VM sizes and images are available in your target location, can easily be done using PowerShell. To get you started with the Azure CmdLets, refer to my previous post.