What is MRemoteNG?

MRemoteNG is a nice Windows OS tool for managing multiple SSH sessions (and session configurations) in one window – so you can log onto 10 servers and hop around trivially.  It is built on top of Putty.

How Do You Use It With Azure VMs?

• When you create a VM in Azure, you give it a public key (assuming you didn’t use password authentication, which you should generally avoid).
• You can generate a key pair with PuTTYGen if you don’t have one (but then I’m assuming that you do have one if you already created the VM).
• Take the private key corresponding to that public key and save it into a file (it may already be in an “id_rsa” file in your .ssh directory in your user directory; e.g. C:\users\your-name\.ssh\id_rsa).
• Open PuTTYgen (it should come with MRemoteNG or Putty, otherwise you can get it yourself.
• Load the private key file.
• Click “Save private key” with Type = RSA selected (2048 bits is fine).  It will save as a “PPK” file.
• Save it to your .ssh folder for consistency, or anywhere else – it really doesn’t matter much.
• Open MRemoteNG -> Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Launch Putty -> Expand “SSH” -> Click Auth (Don’t expand) -> Put your PPK file path in “Private key file for authentication”.
• Click Session in putty and give the session a name in the “Saved Sessions” text box and then click Save.  It should appear in the box below that.
• Now you have a saved session that can use this private key via a PPK file.
• Close Putty, make a new connection in MRemoteNG and select “Putty Session” = the new session you saved.  It should be listed as an option.
• Celebrate!