Whilst creating a virtual machine in Azure IaaS last week, I came across an interesting issue…

I was creating a temporary server and didn’t fully understand the customer’s naming scheme, so I replaced the numerical part of the server name with xxxxxx. Then, when provisioning, I saw that deployment to the resource group had failed, with the following message:

statusCode:BadRequest

statusMessage:{“error”:{“code”:”DomainNameOperationFailed”,”message”:”Unable to create domain name ‘DIRSYNCxxxxxx’: ‘You used a word that may be considered offensive, or the word is embedded in another word.’.”}}

xxxxxx (or probably xxx) appears to be on a Microsoft banned words list! When I changed xxxxxx to 000000 and repeated the operation, everything was fine, although I cant find a list anywhere of reserved words/resource naming restrictions in Azure (understandably, I guess).