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Celebrate the new year: Create your own Minecraft server running in Azure!

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This holiday season I wanted to take a bit of a break and do something fun with Azure. I’ve spent a lot of time around children recently, and many of them Minecraft. I had heard that we now support Minecraft VMs in Azure, and decided it’d be a perfect time to try it out. I’d finally get to figure out if am as a pick-axe or sword person.

 

Requirements:

  • Azure account.  If you don’t have one yet, sign up for a free trial
  • Minecraft account & installed on your computer. $27 available here 
    • You can spin up a Minecraft server in Azure without the Minecraft account, but you won’t be able to play it without the account.

 

Steps:

  1. Log into your account at  https://portal.azure.com/
  2. Go to New-> Search the marketplace and search for Minecraft
    SearchFor
  3. You’ll end up with the following results. 
    Results
  4. My personal favorite is the Minecraft out-a-box server, but all of them will work. Select it, and at the bottom, select Create
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  5. We’ll now be presented with options for creating our Minecraft VM. There are 4 things we need to customize.
    1. Host name - name of your server. This will be <hostname>.cloudapp.net
    2. Username & Password – how you’ll log into the server
    3. Pricing Tier – when we click on this, we can see the recommended sizes for our Minecraft VM. I suggest at least the A2 Standard, we don’t want our server to lag when we’re fighting a skeleton.
      image
    4. Location – this is where your VM is hosted. For best results, pick the location closest to you. Since I’m in the Bay Area, and since there’s no West US, I picked Central US
      image
  6. Select Create to kick off the creation of our Minecraft VM. I suggest leaving the “Pin to Dashboard” box checked, to make it easy for us to check it’s status and find it in the future.
    image
  7. Azure will redirect you back to your Dashboard, and you’ll be able to see it processing.
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  8. Once your VM has been created, click on it to see more information. (NOTE: This may take up to 20 minutes, depending on resources)
    You’ll see a page like this, and you’ll need to record the Virtual IP Address.
    image 
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  9. That was our last Azure step, now launch Minecraft on your computer & log in.
    Select Play
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    Select Mulitplayer
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    Select Direct Connect
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    enter your Virtual IP Address & Join Server
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Success! Time to celebrate the new year by building some cool things