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As a follow up to previous post on how to install and setup Linux Ubuntu under VMWare, I went ahead and created Azure VM as well. Once Azure VM is set up, the Splunk Cluster setup is identical.

For this instructions I would assume you have already set up Azure Subscription. If not, go ahead and create one month Free account with $200 to spend on Azure services.

Contents:

• Setup VMWare Virtual Machine (Azure services)
• Install and Setup Ubuntu Linux (Azure services)
• Install and Setup Splunk
• Indexes Configuration
• Enable Clustering
• Add second Splunk instance to the cluster
• * Potential problems
• Add third Splunk instance to the cluster (Search Head)

Details:

Setup Azure CloudService and Ubuntu Linux VM

1. Start by creating new Cloud Service for HighAvailability and scalability of VMs
2. Make sure that you give you Azure Cloud Service descriptive enough name and choose your Azure region (more info)
3. That’s it, let’s create our first VM under this Cloud Service
4. We will choose Ubuntu 14.04 as our base
5. As the first VM will act as a Splunk Master, let’s give it distinct name and set up size, user name and password
6. Next step allows us to attach this VM to the Cloud Service we created under Step 2 and setup endpoints to your VM. You can set them up now or later. Make sure you enable: SSH, Splunk’s default web port 8000, 8089 for management and 8080 for replication
7. That’s it! That was easy. Now just wait about 5 minutes for your new VM to be fully provisioned. We are now ready to log in to our Azure VM.
8. Linux on Azure is installed without GUI, so the only way to login is through SSH. Use Terminal on Mac or any SSH client on Windows to connect to your machine. You will see your VM’s IP (public virtual IP, VIP) address on the right hand side of the Dashboard panel
9. SSH into your VM:

   $ ssh admin_user@19ipaddress.19

10. For some reason Azure does not set default root password, so let’s fix that:

    $ sudo passwd root

    You now can sudo your commands.

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Optional: enable Desktop environment and Remote Desktop Connection

1. If you want to access your VM using Remote Desktop you must install Ubuntu’s Desktop and enable rdp:

   $ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

   $ sudo apt-get install xrdp

   Also, I recommend running update after each install

   $ sudo apt-get update

2. Make sure you add RDP endpoint using port 3889 (TCP public/private) by selecting Remote Desktop from the list of endpoints
   1. Navigate to VM’s dashboard
   2. Click on Endpoints menu on the top
   3. Click on + (plus) icon
3. We now can RDP into our VM.

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