What's involved in making a server based application available in Azure marketplace using a custom image?

There are only a few steps involved in making a linux or windows VM based application server available in the Azure Market place. If you are interested in the market place publishing process please see this Onboarding post or head over to www.azure.com.

Before we start we will need to deploy a VM in Azure either through the existing marketplace offerings, by uploading a vhd or by restoring from Azure Backup services. Once we have the VM ready with our software installed we are ready to run certification.exe which you can find out more about here. One note around certification.exe to be aware of... The tool uses WinRm(secure) to connect to Windows VMs being certified in Azure and SSH to connect to Linux VMs in Azure, so you need to allow for the related ports in your NSG and at an OS level for the tool to be able to connect.

After the certification tool has been run the Application VM will need to be 'generalized'. Linux generalization is done in Azure using the Linux VM Agent. Windows generalization leverages sysprep. See the links for the full process.

Once the image is prepared it needs to be deployed and tested. ARM templates can be leveraged to create re-usable managed templates that can deploy the generalized application image to Azure. Be aware that the ARM template will be required by the Marketplace team before the application can be certified.