Setup a Minecraft server on Azure

Published by Justin on

Sometimes, we also want a step down from our work and want to fully enjoy a videogame. Especially when you really like games with open worlds, Minecraft is a great game. And what if I tell you we can setup a server for Minecraft on Azure so you can play it with your friends and have a 24/7 uptime this way.

Table of Contents

📖 Estimated read time: 16 minutes

🔄 Page last updated on: October 1, 2025

Requirements

  • An Azure environment
  • Basic knowledge of Azure
  • Basic knowledge of Linux and SSH
  • Basic knowledge of networking and TCP/UDP
  • Experience with Minecraft to test the server
  • Around 45 minutes of your time

System requirements of a Minecraft server

For a typical Minecraft server, without Mods, the guidelines and system requirements are as stated below:

Processor coresRamPlayer SlotsWorld Size
28GBUp to 10Up to 8GB
416GBUp to 20Up to 15GB
832GBUp to 50Up to 20GB
1664GBUp to 100Up to 60GB

Setup the Azure environment for a Minecraft server

Creating the Resource Group

First, we need to setup our Azure environment for a Minecraft server. I started with creating a Resource group named “rg-jv-minecraftserver”.

This resource group can we use to put all of the related resources in. We not only need to create a VM but also an virtual network, Public IP address, Network Security Group and disk for storage.

Creating the Server VM

After creating the Resource group, we can create the server and put it in the created Resource group.

For a single server-setup, we can use most of the default settings of the wizard. For an environment of multiple servers I advice you a more scalable approach.

Image and Size

Go to “Virtual Machines” and create a new virtual machine:

Put the server in the created resource group. I use the image Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS – x64 Gen2 for this deployment. This is a “Long-Term Support” image, which are enterprise grade images with at least 5 years support.

For the specs, I used the size E4s_V6 which has 4vCPU’s and 32GB of RAM. Enough for 20 to 50 players and a big world so the game will not get bored.

Authentication

For the Authentication type, use an SSH key if you are familiar with that or use a password. I used the password option:

Inbound ports

For the inbound ports, use the default option to let port 22 open. We will change this in a bit for more security.

Disks and storage

For the disk settings, let this as default:

I chose a deployment with an extra disk where the server itself is stored on. This way we have a server with 2 disks:

  • Disk 1: OS
  • Disk 2: Minecraft world

This has some advantages like seperate upgrading, more resilience and more performance as the Minecraft world disk is not in use by the OS.

Select the option “Create and attach a new disk”. Then give the disk a name and select a proper size of your needs.

I chose 128GB as size and have the performance tier as default.

Click “OK” and review the settings:

Networking

Advance to the “Networking” tab.

Azure automatically creates a virtual network and a subnet for you. These are needed for the server to have an outbound connection to the internet. This way we can download updates on the server.

Also, by default a Public IP and a Network Security Group are created. Those are for inbound connection from players and admins and to secure those connections.

I let all these settings as default and only checked “Delete Public IP and NIC when VM is deleted”.

Go to the next tab.

Automatic shutdown (if needed)

Here you have a setting for automatic shutdown if you want to. Can come in handy when you want to automatically shutdown your server to reduce costs. You have to manually enable the server after shutdown if you want to play again.

Review settings

After this go to the last tab and review your settings:

Then create the virtual machine and we are good to go! Create the virtual machine and advance to the next part of the guide.

Securing inbound connections

We want to secure inbound connections made to the server. Let’s go to “Network Security Groups” (NSG for short) in Azure:

Open the related NSG and go to “Inbound Security rules”.

By default we have a rule applied for SSH access that allows the whole internet to the server. For security, the first thing we want to do is limit this access to only our own IP address. You can find your IP address by going to this page: https://whatismyipaddress.com/

Note this IP address down and return to Azure.

Click on the rule “SSH”.

Change the “Source” to “IP addresses” and paste in the IP address from the IP lookup website. This only allows SSH (admin) traffic from your own IP-address for security. This is a whitelist.

You see that the warning is now gone as we have blocked more than 99% of all worldwide IP addresses SSH access to our server.

Allow inbound player connections

After limiting SSH connections to our server, we going to allow player connections to our server. We want to play with friends, dont we?

Again go to the Network Security Group of the Minecraft server.

Go to “Inbound Security rules”

Create a new rule with the following settings:

SettingOption
SourceAny*
Source port ranges* (Any)
DestinationAny
ServiceCustom
Destination port ranges25565 (the Minecraft port)
ProtocolAny
ActionAllow
Priority100 (top priority)
NameYou may choose an own name here
*Here we do allow all inbound connections and use the Minecraft username whitelist.

My rule looks like this:

Now the network configuration in Azure is done. We will advance to the server configuration now.

Logging into the server with SSH

Now we can login into our server to do the configuration of the OS and the installation of the Minecraft server.

We need to make a SSH connection to our server. This can be done though your preferred client. I use Windows Powershell, as this has an built-in client for SSH. You can follow the guide:

Open Windows Powershell.

Type the following command to login to your server:

PowerShell
ssh username@ip-address

Here you need your username from the virtual machine wizard and server IP address. You can find the server IP address under the server details in Azure:

I used this in my command to connect to the server:

After the command, type “Yes” and fill in your password. Then hit enter to connect.

Now we are connected to the server with SSH:

Configuring the server and install Minecraft

Now that we are logged into the server we can finally install Minecraft Server. Follow the steps below:

Run the following command to get administrator/sudo access:

Bash
sudo -s

Now you see the line went from green to white and starts with “root”. This is the highest level of privileges on a Linux system.

Now run the following command to install the latest updates on Ubuntu:

Bash
apt-get update

Now there will be a lot of activity, as the machine is updating all packages. This can take up to a minute.

Installing Dependencies

Now we have to install some dependencies for Minecraft Server to run properly. These must be installed first.

Run the following command to install Java version 21:

Bash
apt install openjdk-21-jdk-headless -y

This will take up to around a minute.

After this is done we have to install “unzip”. This is a tool to extract ZIP files.

Bash
apt-get install wget screen unzip -y

This will take around 5 seconds.

Configure secondary disk

Since we have a secondary disk for Minecraft itself, we have to also configure this. It is now a standalone not mounted (not accessible) disk without a filesystem.

Run the following command to get all disks in a nice overview:

Bash
lsblk

In my case, the nvme0n2 disk is the added disk. This can be different on your server, so take a good look at the size which is your disk.

Now we now our disk name, we can format the disk:

Bash
fdisk /dev/nvme0n2

This will start an interactive wizard where it wants to know how to format the disk:

  1. Type n and press enter -> For a new partition
  2. Type p and press enter -> For a primary partition
  3. Hit enter twice to use the default setting for the sectors (full disk)
  4. Type w and press enter -> To quit the tool and save the settings

If we now again run the command to list our disk and partitions, we see the change we did:

Bash
lsblk

Under disk “nvme0n2” there is now an partition called “nvme0n2p1”.

We still need to assign a filesystem to the partition to make it readable. The filesystem is ext4 as this is the most used in Linux systems.

Run the following command and change the disk/partition to your own settings if needed.

Bash
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n2p1

After the command finishes, hit another “Enter” to finish the wizard.

Now we have to create a mount point, tell Linux what folder to access our disk. The folder is called “minecraft-data”.

Bash
mkdir /mnt/minecraft-data

And now we can finally mount the disk to this folder by running this command:

Bash
mount /dev/nvme0n2p1 /mnt/minecraft-data

Let’s try if this works 🙂

Bash
cd /mnt/minecraft-data

This works and our disks is now operational. Please note that this is non-persistent and gone after a reboot. We must add this to the systems disks of Linux to mount this at boot.

Automatically mount secondary disk at boot

To automatically mount the secondary disk at boot we have to perform a few steps.

Run the following command:

Bash
blkid /dev/nvme0n2p1

You will get an output of this command what we need. Mine is:

We have to edit the fstab system file to tell the system part that it must make this mount at boot.

Run the following command to run a text editor to change that fstab file:

Bash
nano /etc/fstab

Now we have to add a line of our secondary disk including its mount point and file system. I added the line as needed:

Bash
UUID=7401b251-e0a0-4121-a99f-f740c6c3ed47 /mnt/minecraft-data ext4 defaults,nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=10 0 2

This looks like this in my fstab file:

Now press the shortcut CTRL and X to exit the file and choose Yes to save the file.

I directly restarted the server to check if the secondary disk is mounted like expected. We don’t want this happening after all of our configuration work of course.

As you can see this works like a charm.

Configure the Minecraft Server itself

Now we have arrived at the fun part of configuring the server, configuring Minecraft server itself.

Go to the created minecraft data folder, if not already there.

Bash
cd /mnt/minecraft-data

We have to download the required files and place them into this folder. The latest release can be found at the official website: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server

First, again acquire Sudo/administrator access:

Bash
sudo -s

We can now download the needed file on the server by running this command:

Bash
wget https://piston-data.mojang.com/v1/objects/e6ec2f64e6080b9b5d9b471b291c33cc7f509733/server.jar

Now the file is at the right place and ready to start:

We now need to create a file to agree with the End User License Agreement (EULA), and can do this with the following command:

Bash
echo "eula=true" > eula.txt

This command creates the file and fills it with the right option.

We can now finally run the server with 28GBs of RAM with the following command:

Bash
java -Xmx28672M -Xms28672M -jar server.jar nogui

Now our server has been fully initialized and we are ready to play.

Connecting to the server

The moment we have been waiting for, finally playing on our own Minecraft server. Download the game and login to your account.

Let’s wait till the game opens.

Open “Multiplayer”.

Click on “Add Server” and fill in the details of your server to connect:

Click on “Done” and we are ready to connect:

Connect and this will open the server:

I already cut some wood for my first house. Haha.

Connecting also generated some logs:

Running the Minecraft server on startup

Now we ran Minecraft server manually at startup, but what we want is that the service automatically starts with the server as this is an dedicated server for it. We want to automate such things.

We are going to create a Linux system service for this. Start with running this command:

Bash
nano /etc/systemd/system/minecraft.service

This again opens a text editor where we have to paste in some information.

Bash
[Unit]
Description=Minecraft Server
After=network.target

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/mnt/minecraft-data
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -Xmx28672M -Xms28672M -jar server.jar nogui
User=root
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then use the shortcut CTRL and X to exit and select Yes to save.

Now run this commands (can be run at once) to refresh the services list and to enable our newly created Minecraft-service:

Bash
sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable minecraft.service

Now run this command to start Minecraft:

Bash
sudo systemctl start minecraft

We can view the status of the service by running this command:

Bash
sudo systemctl status minecraft

We made a seperate service of Minecraft which allows it to automatically run at boot. We can easily restart and stop it when needed without using the complex commands of Minecraft.

With the systemctl status minecraft command you can see the last 10 lines for troubleshooting purposes.

Changing some Server/game settings

We can change some server settings and properties on the SSH, like:

  • Gamemode
  • Player limit
  • Status/MOTD
  • Whitelist on/off
  • Whitelisted players

All of these settings are in files of the minecraft directory. You can navigate to the minecraft directory by using this command:

Bash
cd /mnt/minecraft-data

Open the file server.properties

Bash
nano server.properties

In this file all settings of the server are present. Lets change the status/MOTD message for example:

JSON
motd=[§6Justin Verstijnen§f] §aOnline

This makes the text in colors and all fancy and stuff. You can find this in the internet.

Now save the file by using CTRL + X and select Yes and hit enter. This saved the file.

After each change to those files, the service has to be restarted. You can do this with this command:

Bash
systemctl restart minecraft

After restarting, the server shows up like this:

Summary

While hosting a Minecraft server setup on Azure is a possibility, it’s not that cost-efficiënt. It is alot more expensive than hosting your own server or other 3rd party cloud providers who do this. What is true is that the uptime in terms of SLA is maybe the highest possible on Azure, especially when using redundancy with Availability Zones.

However I had a lot of fun testing this solutionand bringing Minecraft, Azure and Linux knowledge together and build a Minecraft server and write a tutorial for it.

Thank you for reading this guide and I hope it was helpful.

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