Technical Thursday – Consol access in Azure

As you can read in the subject this is a huge step in the last period in Azure. Since I have been working with Azure there was a feature which always missed and caused some inconviniences during VMs administration. You have no console access to VMs so when something happened during the boot you were not able to manage by yourself. Merely you could cross your fingers and wait for the login prompt.

And now a new time begins becasue Serial console is here – in preview – for Linux and Windows VMs.

I suggest to try it and if you have any observations you can share with me or Microsoft to ensure this great feature will be available in production with full functionality. You can leave feedback about this feature when you click on Feedback button on top of the screen. (You can see here the opened bugs as well)

First impression

Username prompt is hidden

When you click on the Serial Console (Preview) button you have to wait 1-2 minutes for initialization then it seems it stops. And here I can see a small bug – I think this is acceptable now. So when you hit an enter it asks immediatelly the password.

Of course because you did not type account name you don’t know which password you should type here. So you just simply hit an other enter it says “Login incorrect” then you can type the username. 🙂

Then of course you can login with the right user and password.

Notes

• The console work correctly. Not the best but this is only preview. 🙂
• You can do everything you want. Nevertheless  the copy/paste oprartions are not too comfortable.
• <End> sometimes work sometimes not.
• The WALinuxAgent sometimes lost the connection with console.

Summary

I am sure this is a great step and useful feature from Microsoft. I hope the Linux gurus also could appreciate this new function. My opinion is absolute positive regarding Serial Console

I suggest to test and open bugs because this is the best support for Microsoft and you. 🙂