Why is my custom VM image not showing up in the Azure Create VM Interface?

Question

I recently ran into the problem of creating and loading a .VHD image containing a small Debian installation for my Azure Storage account. It was created in fixed mode and loaded as PageBlob.

After several attempts, I was able to create an image from my Blob, but I have no idea where to go from here.

Obviously, I want to create a virtual machine instance from my image, but I cannot figure out how to select my image. I followed the link NEW > Compute > Virtual Machine > From Gallery , and there is a tab labeled My Images , but my image does not appear there.

Does anyone have an idea why?

EDIT: When I try to create a drive from my Blob, I get the following error:

The vault account does not support this operation. Check the location of this account or create a new account and try again.

But is the drive not associated with any storage account, or is it?

Answer 1

If you loaded your VHD, you can create a new disk using Virtual Machines > Disks > Create Disk , this will force you to specify the URL of the VHD you downloaded and allow you to specify the OS type and name for the disk.

From there you can create a new virtual machine. New > Compute > Virtual Machine > From Gallery > My Disks

EDIT
A colleague told me that some accounts do not support disks for VMs, and a workaround could be to create a new virtual machine using the portal (either from scratch or using a pre-made gallery image), this will create a storage account called something like portalvhdxxxxxxxx. Then you can upload your VHD to this account and create your own drive.

Answer 2

I ran into the same problem and this question helped me get around this. To provide more detailed information, Azure VMs are currently not supported in some data centers (e.g., Northern Central USA). Therefore, if you create a vault account in an unsupported data center, you can download vhd drops and even create an image from it through the Azure portal. However, this image will not be displayed in the "My Images" section when you try to unscrew the virtual machine from it.

This is pretty confusing, but it seems like this is happening. Therefore, if you want to save your vhd drops in a storage account that is not called portalvhdxxxxxx, just make sure that your storage account is created in a data center that supports virtual machines. To determine exactly what data centers are, these are data centers that you can choose when you quickly create a virtual machine directly on the portal.