installing Minecraft, enabling access from the Internet, and then connecting. It will
probably take about 45 minutes, but I recommend that you stop and do this now. Even
if you don’t want to play Minecraft (your kids will think you are a hero if you do this
for them), the video walks you through key elements of using Microsoft Azure IaaS. In
the next section, I explain the details of creating virtual machines. But for now, I want
to stress some key points to keep in mind:
An extra-small Azure virtual machine would be fine for fewer than 10 users;
however, consider a small VM for more than that, and unless you are very short on
credit, I recommend using a small VM for even fewer than 10 users.
Use the Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter gallery image. Use the version with
the latest release date, which is just a patch level.
Create a separate data disk to store the Minecraft server executable and its data
files. You will need to initialize and format this disk by using Disk Management
(diskmgmt.msc).
Install the 64-bit version of Java. At the time of this writing, the Java Runtime
Environments were available from the following location:
http://java.com/en/download/.
Download the latest version of the Minecraft server from https://minecraft.net/
download, and save to the Minecraft folder you create on your data drive.
Create a firewall exception for TCP port 25565 within the guest OS, which is what
Minecraft listens on.
Create an exception for the Network Security Group (NSG) used by the VM in the
Azure portal for public and private port 25565 to enable external communication to
the port on the VM.
Add your Minecraft account name to the ops.json file to make yourself an
operator on the server. I cover this in more detail at
http://savilltech.com/blog/creating-a-minecraft-server-using-the-new-azure-
portal/.
To run the Minecraft server, I use the following command, which gives Minecraft
1GB of memory instead of 100MB. Save this to a start.bat file and use it to
initialize."C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre1.8.0_91\bin\java " -Xms1024m –
Xmx1024m -jar Minecraft_Server.jar
You now have an up-and-running Minecraft server that you can access by using the
name that you specified during the VM instance creation, as shown in Figure 12.5.
There was nothing special that was Microsoft Azure IaaS-specific except creating the
endpoint to allow connectivity over the Internet. (And thanks to my son for creating
the likeness of me on his Microsoft Azure Minecraft server.) Notice also in the figure
that through the Microsoft Azure portal, I can see the various resource usage states of