Provisioning a New Data Disk

Working with Linux on Azure has brought me back to the basics. This post is all about adding a new Data Disk to an existing Azure CentOS Virtual Machine. If you don’t have a Virtual Machine handy, I wrote a short walkthrough to help you get going.

Provisioning a Virtual Machine on Azure

This post will help you setup a CentOS 7.1 Virtual Machine on Azure using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and PowerShell.

Disk UUIDs and Linux on Azure

I recently ran a few tests to figure out how UUIDs behave on Azure when we capture VM Images, copy VHDs, move Virtual Machines and re-provision them in different data centers.

Using CLI to Capture and Deploy VMs

Capturing and deploying Virtual Machines is a routine job when we work with IaaS Dev and Test environments on Azure. If you’ve worked with the Azure PowerShell CmdLets in the past, this will feel quite familiar.

Let’s dive in!

Before we start, it’s important to have the Azure CLI installed on our machine.

There are few ways to install the Azure CLI.

1. Using an installer
2. Installing Node.js and npm and then using the npm install command
3. Run Azure CLI as a Docker container

Once the Azure CLI has been installed, we are able to use the azure command from a command-line interface (Bash, Terminal, Command prompt) to access the Azure CLI commands.

Moving to a New Azure Datacenter

From time to time, I face interesting challenges. Azure is an exciting platform, because it’s pushing me to learn about things that I wouldn’t of dreamed of a few years back.

This post is all about moving a CentOS Virtual Machine that has a RAID 0 to a new Microsoft Azure Datacenter.

Oops . . . did I delete that VM?

Accidents happen. Resource Locks help prevent them.

The Resource Lock level is applied at the resource group or resource scope. These can be set by the administrators can be set to CanNotDelete.

Using a modified version of the ARM Template from a post on creating a CentOS Virtual Machine, let’s provision a VM that is protected it from accidental deletion. The best thing about creating locks in ARM Templates, is that it centralizes the configuration. It makes it easier to maintain and simplifies our workflow.

As a best practice, we should consider creating Resource Locks for mission critical resources in our Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates.

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While I was playing around with the Azure Resource Manager Copy Operation, I started thinking about what I could do with it. The first wild idea that popped into my head was, to use it to deploy multi-geo environments from a single ARM Template.

Alright, some of you might think that it’s not such great idea, and I can appreciate that. But I’m just too curious, so let’s give this a chance.

Deploying 20 CentOS VMs in 4 Minutes!

I recently started to toy around with scenarios that required me to deploy multiple duplicates of the same CentOS Virtual Machine configuration. Working on this scenario got me curious. So I decided to build a template that would allow me to deploy 20 CentOS Virtual Machines each with one 1TB data disk and one public IP addresses.

To my surprise, deploying these 20 Standard A1 CentOS Virtual Machines on Microsoft Azure took 4 minutes!

Building the ARM Template

Let’s start by taking a CentOS ARM Template from a previous post. It will be our starting point for this exercise. Now, let’s removed the extra data disk and removed the Custom Script for Linux Virtual Machine Extension.

To duplicate a resource, we must use the copy operation. It enables us to use an index number or to iterate through an array of values that can be used when deploying a resource.

"copy": {
          "name": "nodeCopy",
          "count": "[parameters('vmCount')]"
}

In this specific scenario, we want all our Virtual Machines to belong to the same Virtual Network and Subnet. Therefore, we need to duplicate each Virtual Machine, their Network Interface Cards (NIC) and their Public IP Addresses.

The following template, demonstrates the use of copyIndex() and concat(), to generate predictable identifiers for each copy.

Lock it Down!

Accidents happen. Resource Locks help prevent them.

The Resource Lock level is applied at the resource group or resource scope. These can be set by the administrators and current values include CanNotDelete and ReadOnly.

Using a modified version of the ARM Template from a post on creating a CentOS Virtual Machine, let’s provision a VM and protect it from accidental deletion.

As a best practice, we should consider implementing Resource Locks for mission critical resources.

Creating a CentOS VM Using ARM

Docker and Open Source projects are getting lots of attention, so I decided that it was time for me to build a Linux Virtual Machine on Microsoft Azure. This post is all about creating an Azure Resource Manager Template for a CentOS Virtual Machine with two stripped Data Disks. This template should be used as a starting point and may require some tweaking to meet your needs. Feel free to share your thoughts by using the comment section.