How to run desktop applications in Azure X11 Linux virtual machines

To use GUI applications on Azure Linux virtual machines, our customers have found it very useful to tunnel X11 traffic over SSH and display it on their workstations. This article shows you how to use the Microsoft Azure portal to create a Windows Server virtual machine on the same virtual network as a Linux virtual machine that you also create. We install VcXsrv Windows X Server, but you can also use other X11 server applications, such as Xming or MobaXterm, if you prefer.
 
We also show you how to install an SSH client to connect to the Linux machine so you can directly access it from the Windows machine. We use PuTTY, but you can use another terminal emulator, such as MobaXterm. Finally, we test the setup by installing xterm on the Linux virtual machine.
 
This article is authored by Ross Sponholtz from the Azure Customer Advisory Team (AzureCAT).