Problem We recently had a case where a role was stuck in this state.  So on the portal, the deployment line said “Initializing” and the role says “Preparing Node” and it never moves past this.  We cannot remote in using RDP or anything else...

If you want to use the Azure Management APIs from Linux, there are a few things you need to do so that it will work correctly.  If you are getting a problem when you try to connect where it looks like the Azure side is just closing the connection...