There are a myriad of ways to login to Linux systems using Azure AD credentials. Photo credit.

Introduction

There are several ways to do Linux Azure AD authentication. Note that Azure AD was renamed “Microsoft Entra ID” recently, but in this article we’ll use its old name, at least for now. In other words you can log in to your Linux hosts Azure Active Directory (“Azure AD”) credentials in various ways. Azure, Microsoft’s public Cloud, builds on top of Azure AD. In fact, your Azure users, groups, roles and role assignments are stored in Azure AD.

Azure Backup is an Azure service that allows, among other things, backing up Windows and Linux VMs in Azure. The backups are essentially virtual machine snapshots, but backing up and/or restoring individual files is also possible. This article tries to explain how Azure Backup and Linux VMs interact and what is required for them to work. If you’re interested in using Terraform to configure Azure Backup, please have a look at the Enabling Azure Backup on Linux VMs with Terraform article.

Vagrant has built-in support for connecting to Windows VMs using the vagrant rdp command. It does basically does the same as vagrant ssh for Linux VMs. There are a few shortcomings, though: vagrant rdp fails to automatically accept the host key of the VM it is connecting to, at least when using it from Linux with xfreerdp. So, you first need to connect to the VM directly once with raw xfreerdp, then vagrant rdp will start working. Then, when you wipe out the VM, you need to repeat the process again. If you have a high resolution screen you will also notice that vagrant rdp will give you a tiny Windows desktop where you need a magnifying glass to read the text.