How Easy Is It To Spin Up A Linux VM On Windows Azure?

After watching Mark Russinovich’s presentation about IaaS on Azure from TechEd NorthAmerica 2013 I figured I’d try it out to see if it really is as easy as he makes it seem.

After about an hour or so I can confidently report that it is very easy; I’ve got an OpenSuse 12.3 linux VM running with 28Gigs of space to play around with! This is a stock image from the gallery. I went with OpenSuse because I used to run that distro several years back. And because there wasn’t a debian image in the gallery :)

Setting up the VM itself is trivially easy in the new azure portal. It’s a wizard with 5 steps. Most of the time setting this up was spent creating an SSH certificate and configuring a client terminal program (PuTTY).

The portal wizard has a link to instructions for creating the cert and importing it though I deviated a bit when setting up PuTTY. Instead of using PuTTYgen to import the cert created via openssl.exe (windows build of openSSL) I just opened up an SSH session to the linux VM and instructed PuTTY to accept the site’s cert.

Running Fedora 11 in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

Aside from a few quirks during the install (e.g., the partitioning tool kept trying to format the install partition, which makes installation crash immediately after it succeeds), I’ve been pretty impressed with just how easy Fedora is to use.

For the most part the System menu looks like a clone of Windows’ Control Panel (for XP).  It even has an “Add/Remove Programs” application though, to be fair, that’s a pretty generic term.

To get the window manager to display properly I keep having to manually add the “vga=791” boot parameter at boot.  So I figured I’d edit it using the handy “Bootloader” application that’s in Fedora’s System menu.

It starts, asks me for the root password, then promptly crashes!  On the plus side, at least it crashed with a helpful stacktrace complaining of a missing module called “kudzu”.  I’ve never heard of kudzu but the GUI package manager (“Add/Remove Software”) was able to find it about 10 mins after it started updating its list of software.

Alas, it was not to be.  I tried starting the BootLoader app but was never greeted with a user interface for editing the bootloader.  Ah well, grub uses a menu.lst file for most configuration so I’ll have to edit that manually.

The saga continues…