# 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.
    
    ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/620bd06825673f2740ee83dd/edcd2c6f-6195-4aec-8a6b-7572b46bdb5c.png align="center")
    
*   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.
    
    ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/620bd06825673f2740ee83dd/488a56a0-79e4-400f-8979-c98c2cdac0e5.png align="center")
    
*   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.
    

<div data-node-type="callout">
<div data-node-type="callout-emoji">⚠</div>
<div data-node-type="callout-text">Azure defaults your disk to a paid 127GiB tier for some images. Go into the Disks tab and drop it to a Premium SSD under 64GiB or you’ll get billed for storage you don’t need.</div>
</div>

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.
        

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/620bd06825673f2740ee83dd/3db774b5-486c-4653-ad3a-47b9ce0b85e8.png align="center")

### 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`](http://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)

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/620bd06825673f2740ee83dd/06a20928-1148-4551-8277-aa6f8cfadfee.png align="center")

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.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/620bd06825673f2740ee83dd/7cba7b30-99d9-47b0-ae38-aaf31e407bf1.png align="center")

### 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.
    
    ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/620bd06825673f2740ee83dd/4b86f358-184b-4692-aaf5-f4d8adcabc0f.png align="center")
    
3.  You’ll get a blue xrdp login screen — leave session type as **Xorg**.
    
    ![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/620bd06825673f2740ee83dd/0006b9af-df2e-428b-bb23-a0a66a4f7ad0.png align="center")
    
4.  Username + password from VM setup.
    

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

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/620bd06825673f2740ee83dd/6d581344-387f-4bd8-b0b9-80e6d7ea393a.png align="center")

* * *

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.