Today I'm going to talk about how to use Microsoft Azure to deploy a virtual machine, that is able to mine your favorite cryptocurrency with its CPU. In my example I'm going to mine digibyte, but you can do it with any cryptocurrency. So here's what I've done.
Part 1 - Setup
First of all I created a Microsoft Azure account and linked it to my Visual Studio subscription. You can do that with any MSDN subscription. Due to this subscription I receive 130€ on a monthly base. If you are a new user, you can sign up for a free test-subscription. That will give you 170€ on your Azure account.
If you have some credit on your Azure account, you can start and create a virtual machine. To do so, log into the Azure portal (portal.azure.com) and navigate to "Virtual machines". Click on "Add" and select a "Windows Client".
In the next window assign a version of Windows, select the deployment model "Resource Manager" and hit "Create". Enter the credentials for your virtual machine, choose a location and hit "OK".
Now it's getting interesting. Step 2 shows the "Size" panel, where you can choose a physical machine, that runs your virtual machine. Due to the fact that we want to mine CPU-based I recommend to pick a machine that has a lot of cores. You can also see the estimated monthly cost. Step 3 & 4 will offer you some settings to adjust (I didn't made any adjustments) and show a Summary of the whole setup process. After finishing step 4 the virtual machine will be installed, which could take a few minutes.
Part 2 - Mining
If the virtual machine is set up and running select it and hit "Connect". An RDP-connection will be downloaded. Open it up and enter the credentials you entered when setting up the machine. This will give you access to the machine. Once there, download the cpuminer and extract the file to a folder called "cpuminer".
Next I recommend you to sign up for a mining pool. In my case I choosed Miningfield. Register and log into your account. In the menu choose "My Account" and "My Workers" to create a new worker. Simply give it a Login and a password.
Then switch back to your desktop and open a texteditor. Create a file with the following line:
cpuminer-gw64-corei7 -a skein -o stratum+tcp://eu.miningfield.com:3397 -u accountname.workername -p workerpassword
Save the file as "anyname.bat" in the same folder, that already contains the cpuminer files. You are good to go, start your mining process by doublecliking the "anyname.bat" file.
If you liked this tutorial leave a comment or a vote. I'd appreciate :) Cheers