Microsoft last week announced a preview of VM Depot, a community-driven catalog of preconfigured operating systems, applications, and development stacks that can easily be deployed on Windows Azure. VM Depot is hosted by Microsoft’s subsidiary Open Technologies.
Running Virtual Machines on Windows Azure was announced as a preview in June last year and allows you to run Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 and the following predefined Linux Distributions:
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP2
- OpenSUSE 12.1
- CentOS 6.2
- Ubuntu 12.04
These Virtual Machines are available in the Windows Azure Gallery which is available during VM creation. Microsoft also provided support for uploading your own VHD’s containing an OS.
VM Depots allows users to share Linux-based virtual machines for use in Windows Azure. These virtual machines which consists of Debian, Alt Linux and Mageia among others can be deployed from the VM Depot web site to Windows Azure by using the cross-platform command line tools, which are available in the SDK available for Windows, Mac or Linux. You can choose a Virtual Machine image from the VM Depot website, and based on the Region where you want to deploy it, a command line is generated on the website for use with the command line tools.
