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Stay up to date with the latest news and developments for Linux and open source on Azure. Read the blog.

Linux virtual machines in Azure

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Overview

Run Linux virtual machines (VMs) on Azure

Efficiently run Linux workloads on Azure with built-in security and management
  • More than 60% of customer cores in Azure run Linux workloads. Choose from popular Linux distributions including Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Flatcar, and Oracle Linux. Use preconfigured solutions from Oracle and other open-source VM-compatible providers and find Azure-optimized Linux VM images from publishers of your choice. Get the cloud's only co-located technical support from Azure, Red Hat, and SUSE with just one ticket. Choose the underlying processors—AMD, Arm64, or Intel—that best meet your requirements.
  • Develop applications in Java, Python, PHP, Node.js, Go, .NET Core, and other technologies and deploy them in Linux VMs. Create your solutions and host Java application servers using Apache Tomcat, Red Hat JBoss, IBM WebSphere, or Oracle WebLogic in Azure VMs. Run databases including MySQL and MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, SQL on Linux, Cassandra, and Redis.
  • Reduce costs—up to 72% compared to pay-as-you-go prices—with one-year or three-year terms on Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances for Linux. Combine reserved instances with Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux to use your pre-existing on-premises Red Hat or SUSE software subscriptions on Azure. Alternatively, prepay for your SUSE and Red Hat software usage in Azure to save money compared to pay-as-you-go prices.
  • Deploy Linux VMs faster through Azure Resource Manager with community-contributed quickstart templates. Provision and manage Linux VMs in Azure using your favorite DevOps tools, including Ansible, OpenShift, Chef, Jenkins, Puppet, and Terraform.
  • Improve the security of your Azure Linux VMs by integrating your workloads with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) authentication. Monitor your VMs by collecting, viewing, and analyzing log data and use extensions to configure diagnostics. Troubleshoot your Linux VMs in production using the virtual machine serial console.

Built-in security and compliance 

Microsoft has committed to investing $20 billion in cybersecurity over five years.
We employ more than 8,500 security and threat intelligence experts across 77 countries.
Azure has one of the largest compliance certification portfolios in the industry.
Learn more about security on Azure
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Pricing

Get the power, control, and customization you need at competitive prices

Configure and estimate the costs of your Azure VMs using the pricing calculator or learn more about Linux VM pricing.
Try the pricing calculator Learn more about Linux VM pricing
Customer stories

Trusted by companies of all sizes

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“We have access to incredibly powerful technologies with Azure.... We can provision new resources in only a few hours, which used to take us more than a week, and we can get new solutions to market far faster.”
Paulo Costa, Infrastructure Monitoring and Collaboration Manager
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“We’re running very large Kubernetes clusters, a large number of nodes, and many Azure virtual machines, so we constantly push the limits, but Azure is extremely fast to adapt.”
Benjamin Pineau, Senior Software Engineer
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“With our policy-driven architecture, we can put in group policies and security aspects from the start so that we don’t have to redo everything when we set up new servers or virtual machines.”
Carol Wittgren, Head of Digital Acceleration
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Logo of SA Power Networks featuring stylized lightning bolt and the tagline "Empowering South Australia".
“The self-healing capability of Azure Virtual Machines keeps us more resilient than before. Plus, we get scalability and flexibility, so we can resize an environment far more easily and provision or tear down environments effortlessly, which we couldn’t have done on-premises.”
Rocco Lupoi, DevOps Capability Manager
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Resources

Get started with Azure Virtual Machines

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Create a Linux VM with the Azure CLI

The Azure CLI is used to create and manage Azure resources via either the command line or scripts.
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Create a Linux VM in the Azure portal

The Azure portal is a browser-based user interface to create Azure resources.
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Create a Linux VM in Azure with PowerShell

The Azure PowerShell module is used to create and manage Azure resources from the PowerShell command line or in scripts.
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Frequently asked questions

  • Azure supports all the major Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CoreOS, Debian, Oracle Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.
  • A range of guest operating systems, including the Azure-endorsed Linux distributions and supported Windows Server versions. Migrate virtual machines from these VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments with Azure Site Recovery. VMs migrated from these on-premises virtualization platforms run as native Azure IaaS VMs and aren’t dependent on the on-premises hypervisor.
  • Azure offers a broad range of virtual machines—there’s a VM for every workload. View the entire set of Azure Virtual Machine series or read the documentation for Linux VMs to learn more. 
  • The Azure VM technical documentation pages, Azure VM series pages, and Azure VM pricing calculator can help you determine your VM needs.
  • You get co-located technical support from Azure, Red Hat, and SUSE with just one ticket. Explore Azure support options and choose the plan that best fits your needs.
  • Yes. Create an Azure free account to learn how Azure works, try products and cloud services, and view tutorials on how to deploy your first solution in 10 minutes or less.
  • There are no upfront costs and you only pay for what you use. Use Azure Reserved VM Instances and save up to 72%. Additionally, through Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux, you can use your pre-existing on-premises Red Hat or SUSE software subscriptions on Azure. Alternatively, pre-pay for your SUSE and Red Hat software usage in Azure, and save money over pay-as-you-go prices.
  • Yes. Learn more about Azure dev/test pricing and take advantage of discounts on a variety of other Azure services.
  • More than 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure. Azure has more global regions than any cloud provider and offers the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings. Azure offers built-in support for the most popular integrated development environments trusted by more than 20 million developers—Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. And, according to the Linux Foundation, Microsoft is a significant contributor to the Linux kernel.
  • There are several Microsoft and partner tools and a large ecosystem of partners to help migrate on-premises VMs to Azure. Visit the Azure cloud migration and modernization center to learn more about this comprehensive approach. 
  • Create Linux virtual machines in Azure through the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, or Azure CLI. The Azure portal provides a browser-based user interface to create VMs and associated resources. Use the Azure PowerShell module to create and manage Azure resources from the PowerShell command line or in scripts. Use the Azure CLI to create and manage Azure resources from the command line or in scripts.
    Read the documentation
  • Microsoft offers a range of OS-independent SLAs for Azure VMs. Read the SLA for Azure Virtual Machines.
  • Most Azure VMs come with temporary non-persistent local storage. Additionally, Azure offers HDD and SSD storage for data. Learn more about Azure Disk Storage. Refer to the Azure VM technical documentation to learn about the Azure disks that are available for each VM series.
  • Virtual Machine Scale Sets help you create and manage a group of load-balanced and autoscaling VMs. Deploy virtual machine scale sets using Azure Resource Manager templates, which support Windows and Linux platform images and custom images and extensions.
  • Take advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit to use your existing on-premises Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions when you convert your Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server pay-as-you-go Azure VMs to bring-your-own-subscription billing. Typically, VMs deployed from pay-as-you-go images on Azure will incur both an infrastructure fee and a software fee. With Azure Hybrid Benefit, pay-as-you-go VMs can be converted to a bring-your-own-subscription billing model without a redeployment, so you can avoid any risk of downtime. Refer to the documentation for more information.
    Read the documentation
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