This part is optional, should you decide not to use Sitecore’s xDB hosting or MongoLab.

Here are the steps to get this going with Sitecore:

1) In the Azure dashboard click on Virtual Machines, then click Add to add a new one.

2) In the filter items search box type Ubuntu. Alternatively there is a Mongo VM image, but i’ve had mixed results with this one.

3) Click on the Ubuntu item and then click Create.

4) Configure the settings of the VM then click OK. Make sure your incoming ports are configured to allow port 27017 in your network security group.

5) Download Putty http://www.putty.org/

6)  Use Putty to connect to the VM Public IP Address. Enter your VM’s login credentials in the command prompt.

7) Follow this guide to install Mongo on Linux: http://askubuntu.com/questions/757384/can-i-use-14-04-mongodb-packages-with-16-04

8) Run this command in Putty:

sudo nano /etc/mongod.conf

9) Scroll down to the network interfaces section and add the private IP of the Azure Network Interface for your VM (e.g. 10.0.0.4) to the “bindIP” config as follows:

bindIP: 127.0.0.1,10.0.0.4

10) Use RoboMongo or another Mongo client to confirm you can connect.

11) Update your connection strings in Sitecore.

Here is a simple bat file for backing up Mongo DB on Windows using the mongodump command.

in a production environment these can get quite large, so here’s a version of the script that compresses the output with 7zip: github mongo7zip