create Linux Virtual Machine on Azure in one minute

In this blog post, you will learn how to create virtual machine on Azure. There are many ways to create a VM on Azure. You can create VM through Azure CLI or directly on Azure Portal.

Azure CLI

1. Login your azure account and select azure subscription az login
2. Create a new resource group. If you have existing resource group you can use that as well later. To create new Azure resource group you need to pass in a name and location az group create --name rg1 --location eastus
3. Create a new Virtual Machine you need to pass in the name, image,admin-username, admin-password and authentication-type

az vm create \
--resource-group rg1 \
--name vm-01 \
--image UbuntuLTS \
--admin-username defaultuser \
--admin-password "Y0urP@ssw0rd!" \
--authentication-type password

1. Verify if the VM resources has been created. You should see Virtual machine named vm-01

az resource list --resource-group rg1

5.Enable ssh port(22) and RDP port (3389)

az vm open-port --port 22 --resource-group rg1 --name vm-01
az vm open-port --port 3389 --resource-group rg1 --name vm-01

6.Now, we can access our Virtual Machine and let's try to remote it but first, we need to get the public IP Address of the VM.

az vm list-ip-addresses \
--name vm-01 --resource-group rg1 \
--query "[].virtualMachine.network.publicIpAddresses[0].ipAddress" \
--output tsv

then try to SSH

ssh username@public-ip-address
ssh defaultuser@<Azure VM-public ip> 

7.Optionally you can setup a Remote Desktop Protocol server in your VM. We can use xrdp as RDP server on linux and install xfce4 as a lightweight desktop environment.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install xfce4 xfce4-session xrdp
echo xfce4-session > ~/.xsession
sudo systemctl enable xrdp
systemctl start xrdp
systemctl status xrdp

Now you can access your VM using any Remote Desktop Client like Windows App on mac, Remote Desktop on Windows or Remmina on Linux.