Microsoft offers supported Windows Server and Linux images through the Azure image gallery. The selection of Linux-based images in which applications are preinstalled is limited.

However, VM Depot is a great library full of community-created Linux-based images. VM Depot is managed and offered by Microsoft Open Technologies. This is a separate organization that focuses solely on open source.

Note that most of the images are submitted by the open source community. There is no check on what kind of software is running in the operating system.

The home page for VM Depot is at http://vmdepot.msopentech.com. You can browse which images are available. You can also see what command to use for deployment of the image to Microsoft Azure. Examples of images available in VM Depot are as follows:

Most of the images are based on Ubuntu.

There are two methods to create a virtual machine based on a VM...