Fixing the Remote Desktop Connection to a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure

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A few minutes before my second session at the Dutch Techdays started I tried connecting to my Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure through remote desktop. It didn’t connect… The RDP client tried to connect to the Virtual Machine, but nothing happened.

So I rebooted the VM and tried connecting again, confident that this would solve the problem. It didn’t connect…. again. As I started stressing out a bit (the VM was the main character of my session) I thought of one last thing I could try.

Fixing the issue #

The next steps helped me save my Virtual Machine without too much loss of time (I was able to connect again just before the start of my session!):

Go to the Azure Management Portal
Open up the details of the VM you’re having trouble with
Go to the ENDPOINTS tab (see image below)
Select the ‘Remote Desktop’ endpoint and click EDIT at the bottom of the screen
Change the public port to a different (random) number
Wait for the changes to be propagated
Success!

Hope this helps.