Mining XMR with Free Trial from Azure

[Hoddy]

Setting up a Windows Azure trail for free Monero mining:
 
In this guide i will show you how to quickly and easily setup a Windows Azure VM (virtual machine) free trial to mine Monero (XMR). If you wanted to continue after the trail finishes you can but there is no obligation to do so, though it wouldnt be cost effective to do so. Its important to point out that although you will need a bank card to setup the trail it is not used for billing, purely for ID once the trail ends everything will be shutdown for you so wont incur any charges unless you then reactivate the account. Its not against the terms and conditions to use Azure in this way as of writing this but be sure to check the terms and conditions for yourself.
 
Before we begin you will need:
-A Microsoft account (e.g. Hotmail, live or outlook) if you haven't got one you can get one free here: http://live.com
-A bank card (Only used for identification, no charges will be made to the card)
-SSH software, for this guide i will assume most users will be using windows so I will suggest putty https://www.putty.org/ (use the MSI installer)
 
Lets begin:
 
Navigate to the Windows Azure website:  
www.azure.com/
You will notice banners for "Free Trial" click the link.     
Screenshot:https://imgur.com/5oLz2d4

-Login using your Microsoft account details
-Fill in your card details
Screenshot:https://imgur.com/aEQ9Zt7
 
Once complete you will find yourself at the Azure Dashboard from here we can make our Ubuntu VM, I'm using Ubuntu for this guide for ease/speed and minimal requirements however you could use another OS but they wont be covered by this guide.
 
Create a new VM:
 
On the dashboard click the +New in the top Left of the page
 
Then select: "Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS VM" (be sure to click on the words not the tutorial below)   
Screenshot:https://imgur.com/s6bSdWn
 
Then fill in the form:
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/UXN6oqX
-Name: can be anything, i went with AkumaMiner
-VM disk type: SSD
-Username: I went with akuma but you can give it any name (lowercase no symbols)
-Passwords: If you can use a key, if you don't know how use a strong password.
-Subscription: Free Trial  
-Resource Group: Any name you want, I used Akuma
-Location: Can be anywhere you like, the AkumaXMR pool is global so has a good connection internationally
Then click OK
 
Next we need to choose the size of our VM, as we will be mining via CPU we want as many CPU's as we can get for our free £150 or $200 in a month personally I used the D4S_V3 Standard (4 vCPU's), however you will be better off with F-series VM's, especially the V2 series VM's. (Thanks Generalheed).     
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/0xSOQQN
 
The next page, settings can all be left default unless you want to change anything. Then on the final page agree to the terms and click create.
 
You should then be moved to the Overview page, if your not a new icon for your new VM should be on the dashboard, we need to know the VM's Public IP that can be found here.     
Screenshot:https://imgur.com/x70N2jR
 
Now we know the IP we can connect via Putty (Windows) or the Terminal (Linux).
-Putty: open up putty and fill the host name with you username@PublicIPAddress e.g. akuma@127.0.0.1
-Linux:

Code:

ssh username@PublicIPAddress

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/yQV7sm1
Type your password when prompted.
 
Now lets make sure our new box is up to date:

Code:

sudo apt update 
sudo apt upgrade

Its most likely your box will be up to date but its good practice.
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/xS4Bo1e https://imgur.com/9wNh2oo
 
now lets install some dependencies:

Code:

sudo apt install screen libmicrohttpd-dev libssl-dev cmake build-essential libhwloc-dev git 
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/gcc-7.1 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install gcc-7 g++-7 

once this is complete we can download and build the miner using Git:
 

Code:

git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git 
cd xmrig 
mkdir build 
cd build 
cmake .. -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=gcc-7 -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-7 
make install 

The miner is now built and ready to use, however if we want it to keep running after we close our SSH connection we will need to run it in screen, so we create a new screen:
 

Code:

screen -S miner 

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/YNkTM7w
 
You will now see a new blank terminal, enter the miners directory:
 

Code:

cd xmr-stak/build 

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/uUqUcTR
 
Now we need to start the miner with the correct parameters:
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/UV9qMJm
 

Code:

./xmrig --donate-level 1 -a cryptonight -o stratum+tcp://pool.akumaxmr.com:3333 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS -p azure:test@e-mail.com

IMPORTANT: Use your own wallet address and email address in the example above.
 
Now your mining! You can check the status of your miner at https://akumaxmr.com, head to the Dashboard and put your wallet address in to see your worker stats.

Over the next few minutes you will see your diff increase while the pool works out your optimum performance. Also it may take a few minutes until your miner is shown on the pool website, this is because it waits for a valid share before you are added.
 
Now we can logout and leave it running in the background, hold "CTRL" and the press "A" then "D" you are now detached from the screen session you can type "exit" to end the SSH connection.
 
If at any point you want to check on the miner you can SSH in like before then:

Code:

screen -r miner

And that will put you back into the miner session.

*Updated: To show US $ and better VM choice.
*Updated: Added screenshots and reduced donation to lowest amount (1%)

[MinerMinor]

Jumped in to try it out.

In US we get $200 promo credit and at the VM rental page I see 2 viable options:

The one you list is D4S_V3 for $143 for 4 CPUs.

I also see a B8MS for $252 for 8 CPUs.

Any idea on the profitability of the 4 CPUs you suggested? Trying to see if it's worth to go for 8 for less than 2x the rental price.

[Hoddy]

I think it gave between 80 and 100 H/s if I remember rightly, I can't see now because my trial has ended (wanted to check it didn't take any money out before posting). The 8CPU might work out better as you say, you will burn through the trail quicker but that's not a problem. Let me know what you find out and I will update the guide 

[MinerMinor]

Oh geeze. 80-100? Let's say 90 H/s. So $3.50 for the MONTH according to https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/xmr?HashingPower=90&HashingUnit=H%2Fs&PowerConsumption=0&CostPerkWh=0&MiningPoolFee=0

Is that accurate? lol

[Hoddy]

Yeah it's probably accurate, I would expect a little bit more but not huge amounts. Free is free at the end of the day, if your already mining it adds a little bit extra hash power, if not it's something for nothing. You could probably setup some other trials like from other sites and make it worth while following the same guide.

[generalheed]

Actually I'd say the F-series VM's, especially the V2 series VM's are probably the best for this purpose because they're optimized for compute intensive tasks.

[Hoddy]

Thanks for the advice, I've updated the guide!

[NIW3]

MS allows mining on their free trial cloud service ?!?!   
GoogleCloud doesnt allow.

[Hoddy]

Good to know, I had no issue and know others who have done this. I couldn't find anything in the T&C's against it but that's not to to say they might change them. I heard that AWS clamped down on it a while back, not technically breaking their T&C's but they claimed that mining software is a virus so that gave them the right to close the VM's and accounts.

[Seniorius]

can you give some video tutor?? my head spinning here

[Hoddy]

can you give some video tutor?? my head spinning here

Yeah, I will look at making a video guide. I've got screenshots of the steps aswell that I want to add, how far have you got and what are you stuck on?

[dragonmike]

Out of interest, why would you run it out of a Linux VM as opposed to a Windows one?
I want to give this a try, but I suck at Linux. If I could run a Windows instance and dump Claymore on there, it'd be easiest I suppose!

[Hoddy]

Out of interest, why would you run it out of a Linux VM as opposed to a Windows one?
I want to give this a try, but I suck at Linux. If I could run a Windows instance and dump Claymore on there, it'd be easiest I suppose!

I can see no issue with using windows for setup however, I would expect your hash rate to be a bit lower because windows tends to be more resource hungry than Ubuntu.

[mk111]

I have a Azure subscription and have been mining on it for a couple of months.
Per Windows VM it gives about 100H/s which is not much.

[dragonmike]

I have a Azure subscription and have been mining on it for a couple of months.
Per Windows VM it gives about 100H/s which is not much.

That's not much indeed. As a matter of fact, that's a laughable $6 a month.
Isn't there any more powerful sessions you can get/rent that would give you a decent hashrate? A rack of Xeons or Threadrippers would do!

[Hoddy]

You can chose whatever hardware is available, the bigger you go the quicker the trial ends. Would be nice to get a bit more out of it but its a free at then end of the day. If you wanted to continue to mine after the trial it might work out better renting a miner VM from one of the many places online.

[generalheed]

You can chose whatever hardware is available, the bigger you go the quicker the trial ends. Would be nice to get a bit more out of it but its a free at then end of the day. If you wanted to continue to mine after the trial it might work out better renting a miner VM from one of the many places online.

There are super expensive VM's on Azure that also have NVidia Tesla P100 GPU's that'll probably get you several KH/s per VM. However, you'll burn through your free trial within a day. Keep in mind that once you use up your free credits, you actually still do get 750 hours of the B1S series VM for free for a year. Now mining on the B1S VM will get you less than 10 H/s but hey it's free and costs you nothing. I do have a different subscription on Azure and therefore get $150 in Azure credits every month. Currently I'm trying to find a good balance of the F-series VM's to maximize my use of the credits, I've occasionally pushed it too far and end up using up the credits way too early and have to wait weeks for the next set of credits. I'm averaging about 200 H/s across all my Azure VM's at the moment. I'm deciding whether it might be more worth it to burn through all my credits in a day with the NVidia tesla P100 VM's, once a month.

Edit: Well after doing some calculations, I'd make about $7-8 in a day if I mined with 4x Tesla P100's. Which would actually make me slightly more money than mining with the more reasonable VM's. The difference is only like $1-2 though. So if I kept doing that once a month, I wouldn't be making much extra in the long run either lol.

[Hoddy]

I'm interested to see what the results of this would work out profitability wise, I didn't know about the B1S either thanks.

[generalheed]

I'm interested to see what the results of this would work out profitability wise, I didn't know about the B1S either thanks.

I'm probably not going to test it out lol. The mining calculators I've checked it with basically show that I'd only make like $7-8 before I burn out my credits that same day. Whereas if I mined normally and stayed within the budget, I'd still be pretty close to that amount after a month. Might need to use those credits for something else possibly so better to not burn it out all at once lol

[djmuler]

Nice i got it mining for free at 95h/s   thx

But how can i disable automatic renewal in azure subscription to avoid any charges on my credit card?
It is weirdly insane to find it in azure