Change default collation when provisioning a SQL Server VM in the Azure portal
If you are going to utilize the images from Azure marketplace for building your SQL Server instances, I'm not aware of any options to change the server collation. Since the image has SQL Server installed already your only option will probably be to just follow the process to change the default server collation after the VM is provisioned. Which requires rebuilding the system databases. You could add this into your build so it executes the needed commands, but you would have to have the installation media available for that version of SQL Server.