We are having problems creating new virtual machines.
The first problem was of our own making. We used . vhd file as a template that we weren't really expecting to work but wanted to see what happened. It seemed to stall whilst installing extensions
Shortly afterwards we created another virtual machine, this time from the gallery. This too seemed to stall whilst installing extensions. It was like that for at least half an hour.
We were able to connect to this second server via RDP whilst it was doing this but we couldn't join the domain - DNS server not found (even though it had picked up the correct DNS)
So we shut down the first server and the messages saying that it was "installing extensions" disappeared for both servers.
However that didn't clear the problem joining to the domain so we deleted that cloud service and virtual machine and tried again.
This time however it is still saying "Provisioning the virtual machine" and has been for hours.