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Microsoft Azure has a lot of options when it comes to provisioning environments and resources. In my last post about troubleshooting Virtual Machine allocations, I enumerated a few of these options and briefly mentioned that I favored destroying environments to shutting them down. In this post, I will try to give more context around my preference.

My Azure Virtual Machine Won’t Start

To benefit from elasticity on Microsoft Azure, we regularly leverage strategies that utilize Azure Automation to shut down and de-allocate Virtual Machines when they are not needed.

This strategy is excellent and usually works on pretty well. Due to Azure’s highly dynamic nature, the allocation of Large Virtual Machines can sometimes pose a challenge in the form of “The server encountered an internal error. Please retry the request.” or “Failed to produce an allocation for the service.“.

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My previous post was about using the Azure Resource Manager to provision a Virtual Machine. It demonstrated how to use a custom PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) to stripe, format and assign a drive letter to a storage space that contains thirty-two 1TB VHDs.

Debugging a custom PowerShell Desired State Configuration was a challenge, because I was completely new to PowerShell DSC and to the Azure Virtual Machine DSC Extension. This post is all about how I managed to debug, refine and test using the artifacts created by the Virtual Machine Extension.

A Monster VM Azure Resource Manager Template

In April I wrote a post about building a monster Virtual Machine using PowerShell on Microsoft Azure. Since then, Microsoft has released version 2 of the Azure Resource Manager (ARM). This version allows us to define a Virtual Machine, its data disks and its Desired State Configuration (DSC) VM Extensions as a template. Seeing this as a great opportunity, I decided to convert my first PowerShell script to an ARM template that would create a Virtual Machine and striped data disk.

The Target Virtual Machine Configuration

16 Cores
112 GB of RAM
800 GB of local SSD for temp disk
32 TB for the data disk
50,000 IOPS for the data disk
512 MB per second for the data disk

DSC Module to Prepare a Stripe Volume

This post marks my first adventure with PowerShell Desired State Configuration. Over the past few weeks, there have been a few announcements around Microsoft Azure. Once of these, is an extended version of the Azure Resource Manager which brings us the ability to run PowerShell DSC on Virtual Machines. This update changes everything and I will delve into it in an upcoming post.

Using the xDSCResourceDesigner enabled by installing Windows Management Framework 5.0 Preview April 2015, I was able to use the following commands to scaffold a Customer PowerShell Desired State (DSC) Module that allows me to stripe data disks on an Azure Virtual Machine.