As you know, Microsoft has officially supported FreeBSD virtual machine (VM) running on Azure since 2014 and last year Microsoft announced the availability of FreeBSD 10.3 as a ready-made VM image in the Azure Marketplace. Now if you go to Azure Marketplace, you also will see FreeBSD 11 VM and pfsense offering there too.
Today we are happy to share you that Azure supports OpenBSD 6.1 with the collaboration effort from Esdenera and Microsoft. Meanwhile Esdenera brings their firewall product based on OpenBSD on board Azure Marketplace now.
What is OpenBSD?
The OpenBSD project produces a freely available, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. The goals place emphasis on correctness, security, standardization, and portability.
- OpenBSD is thought of as the most secure UNIX-like operating system by many security professionals, as a result of the never-ending comprehensive source code audit.
- OpenBSD is a full-featured UNIX-like operating system available in source and binary form at no charge.
- OpenBSD integrates cutting-edge security technology suitable for building firewalls and private network services in a distributed environment.
- OpenBSD benefits from strong ongoing development in many areas, offering opportunities to work with emerging technologies and an international community of developers and end users.
How to bring your own OpenBSD to Azure?
You can follow the guidance to prepare your custom OpenBSD image, convert virtual hard disk to the fixed VHD format, upload it to Azure storage and create a virtual machine from uploaded VHD.
Latest Azure Agent added the support of OpenBSD which contributed by Esdenera. Next release will be v2.2.13.
Do you want to use OpenBSD based Virtual Appliance on Azure?
The Esdenera Firewall 3 is a professional network appliance that has been built for Enterprise networks, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and remote access solutions. It is built upon Esdenera’s TNOS network operating system, an OpenBSD-based platform developed for Esdenera’s OEM customers.