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Linux virtual machines in Azure

Create and deploy enterprise-grade open-source and community-driven software in seconds and reduce costs.

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Get up and running with your favorite Linux distribution

More than 60 percent of customer cores in Azure run Linux workloads. Choose from popular Linux distributions including Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, and CoreOS. Use preconfigured solutions from Oracle and other open-source virtual machine (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.

See the supported Linux distributions on Azure

Explore Linux VM images on the Marketplace

CentOS is reaching End-of-Life (EOL) on June 30, 2024. Learn more about CentOS EOL guidance migration options in Azure.

Comprehensive security and compliance, built in

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Find the right Azure VMs for your needs and budget with the virtual machines selector

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.

Get started with an Azure free account

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Start free. Get USD200 credit to use within 30 days. While you have your credit, get free amounts of many of our most popular services, plus free amounts of 55+ other services that are always free.

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After your credit, move to pay as you go to keep building with the same free services. Pay only if you use more than your free monthly amounts.

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After 12 months, you'll keep getting 55+ always-free services—and still pay only for what you use beyond your free monthly amounts.

Trusted by companies of all sizes

“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, CTT - Correios de Portugal

“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, Datadog

“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, Aurobay

“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, SA Power Networks

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Documentation, training, and migration resources

5-minute quickstart

Build an NGINX web-server within an Ubuntu VM using:

Azure CLI

Azure portal

Azure PowerShell

Learning modules

Learn how to provision Linux VMs on Azure with step-by-step guidance from Microsoft Learn.

Linux on Azure

Plan your Linux environment in Azure

Explore all Azure courses and learning paths

Community and Azure support

Ask questions and get support from Microsoft engineers and Azure community experts.

Azure Community Support

Chat with an Azure support specialist

Migrate to Azure

Manage costs and migrate apps, data, and infrastructure with these free resources.

Popular templates and labs

Discover self-paced labs and popular quickstart templates for common configurations.

Self-paced labs

Quickstart templates

Azure video resources

Pre-provisioned VMs and partner solutions

Connect with certified partners and choose from thousands of apps and VM images on:

Microsoft AppSource for line of business apps and services

Azure Marketplace for infrastructure apps and services

  • Azure supports all the major Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, 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.

    Learn more about supported distributions and versions

  • 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.

    Get started

  • There are no upfront costs and you only pay for what you use. Use Azure Reserved VM Instances and save up to 72 percent. 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 percent 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. Compare Azure vs. AWS. And, according to the Linux Foundation, Microsoft is a significant contributor to the Linux kernel.

    Compare Azure vs. AWS

  • Explore this comprehensive approach. There are several Microsoft and partner tools and a large ecosystem of partners to help migrate on-premises VMs to Azure. Visit the Azure migration center to learn more.

  • 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.

    For more information please refer to 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.

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