Setup and installation of 'Hermes Agent – Build, Deploy & Scale Autonomous AI' on Azure

This section describes how to launch and connect to ‘Hermes Agent – Build, Deploy & Scale Autonomous AI’ VM solution on Azure Platform.

1. Open Hermes Agent – Build, Deploy & Scale Autonomous AI VM listing on Azure Marketplace.

2. Click on Get It Now

• Login with your credentials, provide the details here. Once done click on Get it now button at the bottom.

• It will take you to the Product details page. Click on Create.

• Select a Resource group for your virtual machine
• Select a Region where you want to launch the VM(such as East US)

• Note: If you see “This image is not compatible with selected security type. To keep trusted launch virtual machines, select a compatible image. Otherwise change your security type back to Standard” error message below the Image name as shown in the screenshot below then please change the Security type to Standard.

• Optionally change the number of cores and amount of memory.

Minimum VM Specs : 16GB RAM /4vCPU. Please also check publisher recommendations for more instance options.

Please note that the VM can also be deployed using NVIDIA GPU instance for faster execution. Please check Publisher recommendations instance type for GPU (Standard_NC4as_T4_v3 - 4 vcpus, 28 GiB memory) or check the available NVIDIA GPU instances on Azure documentation page.

Select the Authentication type as Password and enter Username as ubuntu and Password of your choice.

• Optionally change the OS disk size and its type. By default the VM comes with 50GB of disk.

• Optionally change the network and subnetwork names. Be sure that whichever network you specify has ports 22 (for ssh), 3389 (for RDP) , 80 (for HTTP) and 443 (for HTTPS) exposed.

The VM comes with the preconfigured NSG rules. You can check them by clicking on Create New option available under the security group option.

• Optionally go to the Management, Advanced and Tags tabs for any advance settings you want for the VM.
• Click on Review + create and then click on Create when you are done.
  Virtual Machine will begin deploying.

3. A summary page displays when the virtual machine is successfully created. Click on Go to resource link to go to the resource page. It will open an overview page of virtual machine.

4. If you want to update your password then open up the left navigation pane, select Run command, select RunShellScript and enter following command to change the password of the vm .

sudo echo ubuntu:yourpassword | chpasswd

Now the password for ubuntu user is set, you can SSH to the VM. To do so, first note the public IP address of the VM from VM details page as highlighted below

Open putty, paste the IP address and click on Open.

login as ubuntu and provide the password for ‘ubuntu’ user.

5. You can also connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local windows machine using RDP protocol or local linux machine using Remmina.

6. To connect using RDP via Windows Machine, copy the public IP address of the VM from VM details page , then From your local windows machine, goto “start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote desktop connection”. In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, copy the public IP address and click connect

7. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide the username as ubuntu and the password set in the step 4 to authenticate. Click OK

8. Now you are connected to the out of box “Hermes Agent – Build, Deploy & Scale Autonomous AI” VM’s desktop environment via Windows Machine.

9. To connect using RDP via Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page, then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.

Note: If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, first Install Remmina as per your linux distribution.

10. In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from dropdown and paste the external ip and click enter.

11. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in above reset password step to authenticate. Click OK

12. Now you are connected to out of box “Hermes Agent – Build, Deploy & Scale Autonomous AI” VM’s desktop environment via Linux machine.

13. The VM will generate a random password to login to Hermes Web Interface. To get the password, connect via SSH terminal as shown in above step and run below command.

cat /home/ubuntu/.hermes/.env | grep HERMES_DASHBOARD_BASIC_AUTH

14. To access the Hermes Web Interface, copy the public IP address of the VM and paste it in your local browser as https://public_ip_of_vm. Make sure to use https and not http.

Browser will display an SSL certificate warning message. Expand the warning message, accept the certificate warning and Continue.

15. It will open a login page. Provide the password we got at above step and click Sign In.

16. Now you are connected to out of box Hermes Web Interface.

17. You can use the Hermes chat feature to run tasks or ask questions.

18. By default the LLM model set is “deepseek-r1:8b"h. You can pull other ollama models using.

ollama pull <model_name>

e.g ollama pull gemma2:9b

19. Once your model is pulled you can set it to default from web interface as well as from terminal. To switch model from web interface, simply click on model dropdown from the right top of your chat window. Choose the model you want to set and click Switch

or from terminal you can run,

hermes config set model <provider_name>/<model_name>

e.g hermes config set model ollama/gemma2:9b

20. To change the LLM provider and set the API Keys, please run below command.

hermes model

choose your provider of choice and follow the on screen instruction. Once the process is complete, go back to web interface and refresh the page to see the changes.

21. If for any ollama model you are getting context length error as shown in below screenshot, while running the chat then set the context_length and ollama_num_ctx to required value by running below commands in terminal then refresh the WebUI.

Note: This is specific to ollama, if you want to do it for other providers then make the appropriate changes in below commands.

 hermes config set model.ollama_num_ctx 65536

hermes config set model.context_length 65536

For more details, please visit Official Documentation page