My Azure Journey #1: Free Trial Sizing Headaches (and finally fixing Ubuntu RDP)

Hello everyone! I'm a frontend guy who's never really touched Azure before. But my new project demands it, so here I am, fresh off signing up for the free trial last weekend.

My initial plan was simple: learn the core services first. Head to YouTube, search "Azure services for beginners," and do the hands-on stuff in parallel. After I went through the VM tutorials, I decided to spin up a Windows VM since Windows just has Remote Desktop built in — no setup needed. Went to the portal... and nothing worked.

Quota errors, weird region restrictions, vm size NotAvailableForSubscription (cool error message, very helpful, thanks Microsoft). I probably burned an hour just retrying different combos before I understood what was actually going on.

This is the first part of my record of the mess so that future-me (and perhaps you) won't have to go through it again.

Issue #1 — the free tier VM sizing trap

Here’s what I wish someone had just told me up front:

• As soon as you pick a Windows image, Azure auto-fills the VM size with whatever the image creator recommends. Sounds helpful, except that size is usually not available for free trial accounts, so you just get slapped with a "not available for this subscription" error, no explanation.

• The Fix is annoying but simple: manually flip through regions and zones yourself until one sticks, and double-check the minimum supported size for whatever image you picked.

  

• After googling for some time, I figured out that Bv2 series - 750 free hours. You want Standard_B2ats_v2 (AMD) or Standard_B2ts_v2 (Intel). Not obvious from the dropdown, you kind of have to search for it by clicking on see all sizes options.

  

• Both of those give you 2 vCPUs but only 1 GiB of RAM. Which is… not a lot.

• I tried Windows Server 2025 (Smalldisk) first since it comes with a real desktop UI out of the box. But it was very slow on 1GiB RAM.

• Went with Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS in the end. Almost grabbed 24.04 since it's newer, but it idles at like ~700MB vs 22.04's ~400MB — and when you're squeezed into 1GB total, that's not a small thing.

Cool, so Ubuntu solves the RAM problem by introducing a new problem 😭

Issue #2 — no GUI, no RDP, just a black terminal

Ubuntu Server has literally no RDP support out of the box. Doesn’t matter that I set a username/password or ssh during setup — there’s no desktop, no GUI, nothing. Just SSH into a black terminal. Being at least half backend-curious these days I wanted a real UI to poke around in, so here’s how I hacked one together.

Step 1 — Open the firewall ports

Azure blocks everything by default for security purposes, so you have to manually open doors for your own traffic.

1. Go to VM dashboard → Select your VM → Network settings on the left.

2. Create on port rule button → Inbound port rule.

   1. For SSH: port 22, protocol TCP, source *, action Allow.

   2. For RDP: port 3389. Keep the priority around 300ish so it doesn’t get shadowed by something else.

Step 2 — install a desktop + Xrdp over SSH

Since Ubuntu won’t talk RDP natively, we need to SSH in first and bolt a GUI on manually. But there's a big gotcha: if you didn't configure your SSH key during VM creation, you won't be able to log in at all.

I made this exact mistake—here is how I fixed it and got connected:

1. On Windows, PowerShell: ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 just hit enter through all the prompts.

2. Open C:\Users\<you>\.ssh\id_rsa.pub in Notepad, copy everything.

3. Back in the Azure Portal → VM → Help → Reset password.

4. Switch mode to Reset SSH public key, paste your key in, hit Update.

Open PowerShell locally:

ssh your_azure_username@<Your_VM_Public_IP>

(use the azure username you set up, not your laptop’s local one — I mixed this up first try, wasted 5 min confused why login kept failing)

Run the following commands one at a time:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install xfce4 xfce4-goodies xrdp -y

echo xfce4-session >~/.xsession

sudo systemctl restart xrdp

XFCE because it’s lightweight — perfect for a 1GB box. Anything heavier and you’re back to the laggy Windows situation.

Step 3 — connect with Remote Desktop

1. Open the Remote Desktop Connection app on Windows.

2. Paste in your VM’s public IP, hit Connect.

   

3. You’ll get a blue xrdp login screen — leave session type as Xorg.

   

4. Username + password from VM setup.

And that’s it, boom — full Ubuntu desktop, inside your RDP window, actually usable.

Honestly, the sizing/quota stuff was way more annoying than the actual technical setup. Once I knew which VM size to choose, this whole thing took like 15 minutes.

Anyone else hit the same free trial quota wall? Let me know in the comments below.