Azure technical setup notes¶

Technical Configuration¶

To set up a free account, you must:

• Get a Sponsorship (see Azure_VPS_setup_notes)
• Create a Subscription linked to the Sponsorship (see Azure_VPS_setup_notes)
• (Strongly recommended) Grant access to the subscription to other users.
• Create a Resource Group linked to the Subscription
• Create a Virtual Machine (and associated resources) linked to the Resource Group

Create a resource group¶

• Select "Resource Groups" from the main Azure portal (left sidebar).
• Select Create and give it a name.
• Your subscription should be pre-selected since you only have the one.
• Click Review and Create, then Create.

Create a virtual machine¶

• Click on your new resource group in the Azure Portal.
• Click Create.
• Search for the name of the image you want (e.g. Debian 13 "Trixie).
  • If you picked an image that shows an hourly cost, it's the wrong one.

Basics page configuration¶

• Set the virtual machine name (e.g. "wfa01" and pick a region. US East doesn't have many servers available, US East 2 does. Note that region affects cost, be careful when picking other regions.
• Set the VM architecture to Arm64, then pick the image. My current standard server is the D2ps_v6.
  • "D2" is general-purpose VM, we always select this. "a" is AMD-series (old preference), "p" is ARM64, "d" is temp disk included (we don't need this), "s" supports premium SSD disks. v6 is the latest gen, always use the latest gen.
• Set the username to you (jon in my case). Authentication type: SSH public key. SSH public key source: Use existing public key. SSH public key should be the key of the machine you intend to run Ansible from.
• Select all 3 public inbound ports: 22, 80, 443.
• Go to the Disks tab.

Disks tab configuration¶

• Change the OS disk size to 128GB.
• Optionally change "Premium SSD" to "standard SSD". I've wavered on this.
• Click Review and create, wait for validation to finish, then click Create.

Post-provisioning configuration¶

Once the server is provisioned (takes a minute), click Go to resource.

Get serial console working¶

Serial console is necessary for single-user mode, and troubleshooting if SSH fails. It's normally working out of the box now. Go to "Serial Console" in the VM left navigation and ensure you see a Debian login screen.

Modify Firewall Rules¶

• Click Networking settings in the side navigation.
• You should see your firewall settings. They should look like the screenshot below, except they'll be missing the two items circled.
• Add the "allow_ping" and "Port_5665" rules to the Inbound Port Rules as shown in the screenshot.
  • More recently, I've been restricting the Source on the Port_5665 rule to the Icinga server's IP.

Add a swapfile¶

Complete instructions are here but in short, add this to /etc/waagent.conf for an 8GB swapfile:

    ResourceDisk.Format=y
    ResourceDisk.EnableSwap=y
    ResourceDisk.SwapSizeMB=8192

Then run service walinuxagent restart.