Have you ever spent hours building a machine to use as an admin workstation for Azure? What about installing the Windows Subsystem for Linux? Well, have we have something for you!

It’s always a pain to get going with a good VM to use for admin tasks with Azure. With this Azure VM, you will be able to get going right away!

Software / Tools Included in VM

The following software is installed and ready to go after the twenty-five-minute deployment (yes, greatness takes a while).

Chocolatey Package Manager
Office 365 Pro Plus
Azure Storage Explorer
Azure Powershell
Azure CLI (Windows)
Azure CLI (bash – manual install)
Windows Terminal
Git for Windows (bash)
Microsoft Edge
Putty
SysInternals
Visual Studio Code
Kubernetes CLI
Kubernetes Helm
Terraform CLI
Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu 18.04)
WinRar
7-Zip

Az Kung Fu VM - Master Tools for Azure Administrators 1 — Screenshot of the Az Kung Fu VM and many apps installed

Deploy the Azure CLI Kung Fu VM to your Azure Subscription

The Azure CLI Kung Fu VM is setup as an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Template with additional custom scripts that you can easily deploy to any Azure Subscription you need. It is also open source, so we can easily share it with you, and so there’s complete transparency with the scripts created for deploying the VM template.

The process to deploy and get the Azure CLI Kung Fu VM running is as follows:

Get started by finding your current IP Address. This is done so you can secure the VM easily for your access.

You can use IP Chicken, or search "IP Address" in your favorite search engine.

Next, Click the Deploy to Azure button.

You can also find the ARM Template and scripts for the VM template in the build5nines/az-kung-fu-vm repository on Github.

Supply a username and password along with your IP address to secure the Network Security Group (NSG).

It will take about 25 minutes for the VM to provision with all of the software installed.
Use Microsoft Remote desktop to connect to the VM and get started on your path to becoming an Azure CLI Kung Fu Master!

Setup WSL with Ubuntu 18.04

Once you have the Azure CLI Kung Fu VM provisioned, you can also set the Ubuntu support using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Connect to the VM using Remote Desktop, then click the Install Ubuntu link on the desktop.

Follow the deployment instructions to get your WSL environment configured.

Az Kung Fu VM - Master Tools for Azure Administrators 2

When WSL is installed, your last step will be to get the az cli installed. The following command can be run in the Ubuntu bash prompt to install the Azure CLI within the WSL environment:

sudo apt-get update -y && curl -sL https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCLIDeb | sudo bash

wsl-installed — az-kung-fu one-click vm after WSL is installed

And that’s it! You now have a great Office 365, Windows 10 based Azure Workstation to get going with! If you have suggestions or want to get involved feel free to open issues or clone the repo and make this even better! There are more things coming with the az-kung-fu project from Build5Nines!

Az Kung Fu VM Overview Video

Here’s a video overview building the Az Kung Fu virtual machine:

Azure CLI Kung Fu VM for Administrators, DevOps, Developers and SRE!

Az Kung Fu VM - Master Tools for Azure Administrators 3

We look forward to you joining us as an Azure CLI Kung Fu Master!

In addition to the great content here on Build5Nines.com, and the Build5Nines Weekly newsletter, you can also follow Dan Patrick on Twitter at @deltadan.

About the Author

Dan Patrick

Dan Patrick is the Chief Infrastructure Architect for Solliance and a 15 year veteran at Microsoft. He has an extensive background in IT Infrastructure and Operations. Dan has both architected and lead teams building and supporting some of the largest service providers in North America with as many 15,000 Windows Servers and 120 million endpoints. Dan has worked with Azure IaaS solutions extensively since 2012. He has a passion for Virtualization with deep experience leveraging Hyper-V, Vmware, and Citrix. He is also a Clustering specialist focusing on large host clusters and SQL Always On Availability Groups. Recently Dan, authored the Networking, Azure Active Directory and Containers portion of the 70-533 Exam Reference for Microsoft Press. You can follow him on Twitter @deltadan