Create an Azure VM from Linux ISO

Question

Create an Azure VM from Linux ISO

Adrian Evangelista 56

Hi, I understand it is not possible to create an Azure VM from an ISO, but have read that there are situations where you can mount a ISO to a VM (by creating a VHD from the ISO). What I am trying to do is create an Azure VM from an older version of CentOS to that in the default images list. I want to install CentOS 7.9, as some of the software is not compatible with the CentOS8.2 version. I did try using a 7.9 version from the marketplace, but wasnt suitable whenever connecting to the vm seeing the publisher name. I'm trying to create a fresh (vanilla) image from the ISO to create a new VM. What's the best practices for doing so and can this image be used to create more than 1 vm? similar to generalising an image for a Windows OS..

SUNOJ KUMAR YELURU 15,256 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2021-02-08T03:38:55.243+00:00

To follow-up, Please let us know if you have further query on this.
Please don’t forget to Accept the answer

5 answers

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SUNOJ KUMAR YELURU 15,256 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2021-02-08T03:38:55.243+00:00

To follow-up, Please let us know if you have further query on this.
Please don’t forget to Accept the answer

Answer 1

Hi @Adrian Evangelista

You cannot create an Azure VM from an ISO file. you can only create VMs from VHDs, Managed Disks or Managed Disk Images/Snapshots.

If you want to use this ISO in Azure you would need to use something like HyperV on premises to create a VM and then export the VHD and upload to Azure. Make sure you follow this guide to create the VHD in a format Azure can understand.

Upload a generalized VHD and use it to create new VMs in Azure

If the Answer is helpful, please click Accept Answer and up-vote, this can be beneficial to other community members.

Answer 2

Andreas Baumgarten 123.4K MVP Volunteer Moderator

In addition to the answer of learn2skills this might be helpful as well:

Prepare a CentOS-based virtual machine for Azure
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/create-upload-centos

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten

Adrian Evangelista 56 Reputation points

2021-02-09T11:51:38.497+00:00

Hi,
I followed the steps outlined in the link for setting up the vhd. however, after creating an image and using it to create a new vm it failed at the provisioning stage. i suspect maybe something in the link i hadnt done correctly? i very familiar with generalising a windows build (sysprep), but not as much on linux. for example, the last part in the link, all commands are '#' out, i ran all of these as i want to generalise.. maybe something else i missed?

Answer 3

Andreas Baumgarten 123.4K MVP Volunteer Moderator

To make it easier: Why not choosing a "ready to go" CentOS 7.9 from the list of images (instead of CentOS 8.2)?

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten

Adrian Evangelista 56 Reputation points

2021-02-10T00:03:36.433+00:00

Hi thanks. This is what I initially did and what I meant by when users SSH to the vm they are greeted with a large text graphic of the publisher everytime they connect. As this would be used by some clients i was just trying to avoid confusion as "Cloud Maven", for example doesn't have anything to do with my organisation. If that's the only solution for now then i guess that's what I'd have to do (to meet my deadline).
2 things though, how come some are free and some are not? (are they not preconfigured baseline images? - ie. all the same?)
Andreas Baumgarten 123.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2021-02-10T18:43:44.72+00:00

I didn't checked and compared all different Marketplace offers
If the publisher did not provide helpful descriptions you need to test what is the difference between all the offers and why some are free and some you have to pay for.

(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten
m00cat 6 Reputation points

2021-07-29T11:14:54.597+00:00

JJust wanted to comment on this - complaining about the banner displayed on SSH login makes me wonder how you got as far as deploying VMs - you could have done a quick google to find how to change the banner. It's not actually difficult to do and I'll go even further and say that if you are being tasked with deploying Linux VMs by your organisation then you should probably have the knowledge to perform a simple task like this.

For anyone else coming across this thread who doesn't know how to change the banners - this is how you do it:

To change the message displayed before login, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config :

$ sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
and add (or uncomment) the line

Banner /etc/banner
/etc/banner can be whatever file you want. Then edit /etc/banner

$ sudo vi /etc/banner
and put in whatever welcome message you want:

+++ MY WELCOME BANNER +++
You’ll probably need to restart sshd before your changes take effect:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart
To change the message displayed after login, edit /etc/motd :

$ sudo vi /etc/motd
and enter the message you want to display.
Adrian Evangelista 56 Reputation points

2021-12-02T12:30:30.433+00:00

nice one cheers!

Answer 4

Adrian Evangelista 56

Just to clarify what i was doing (as we do not have a Hyper-v host in our domain environment) was creating a VM on my local surface pro (from Hyper-V) using the installation ISO, installing the OS and configuring the root pwd and users.
I then went through the CentOS 7 section in the link (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/create-upload-centos)
After shutting down, I uploaded the VHD to a storage account in Azure
Then created an VM using that Image
FAILED during provisioning
2021-02-09T23:13:55.142412Z WARNING Daemon cloud-init does not appear to be running
2021-02-09T23:13:56.145909Z INFO Daemon Waiting for cloud-init to copy ovf-env.xml to /var/lib/waagent/ovf-env.xml [1755 retries remaining, sleeping 1s]

Adrian Evangelista 56 Reputation points

2021-02-10T00:06:08.947+00:00

also tried the steps outlined here, but also failed - https://www.informaticar.net/prepare-centos-vm-for-azure-stack/
Adrian Evangelista 56 Reputation points

2021-02-15T01:19:50.403+00:00

hmm, still trying to figure this one out. The above link does contradict what's in the MS doc. I suspect the issue lies within either the settings in the '/etc/waagent.conf' file or something due to the absence of the /var/lib/waagent/ovf-env.xml file..
any linux gurus out there that can shed some light on this - or how to proeperly deprovision a linux vm for an image.

Possible the MS instructions could be outdated..?

Answer 5

Hi, Just an update on this. I ended up doing the install and setup without using cloud-init. i configured the waagent.conf to use a swap file and everything worked perfect.

I did reach out to Azure support and they mentioned it may have failed previously due to a typo in the /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/91-azure_datasource.cfg file (it needed an indent in to format the config correctly). I didn't try this, as i already had a working solution, but thought to mention incase someone else had this issue.

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Create an Azure VM from Linux ISO

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