{"id":2487,"date":"2015-03-19T15:33:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T11:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/?p=2487"},"modified":"2015-03-19T15:33:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T11:33:00","slug":"azure-stuff-ive-been-up-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/virtualization\/azure-stuff-ive-been-up-to\/","title":{"rendered":"Azure stuff I’ve been up to"},"content":{"rendered":"

Past few days I’ve been writing this PowerShell script to set up an Azure lab environment automatically. In the time that I spent writing this script I am sure I could have set up numerous labs by hand, so it’s probably a waste of time! It’s also been a waste of time in the\u00a0sense that instead of actually doing stuff in this lab I have\u00a0spent that time scripting.\u00a0I had to scale back a lot of what I originally set out to do because I realized they are not\u00a0practical and I was aiming for too much. I have a tendency to jump into what I want to do rather than take a moment to plan out I want, how the interfaces will be etc, so that’s led to more waste of time as I coded something, realized it won’t work, then had to backtrack or split things up etc.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The script is at GitHub<\/a>. It’s not fully tested as of date as I am still working on it. I don’t think I’ll be making too much changes to it except wrap it up so it works somewhat. I really<\/em> don’t want to spend too much time down this road. (And if you check out the script be aware it’s not very complex and “neat” either. If I had more time I would have made the interfaces better for one).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two cool things the script does though:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You define your network via an XML file. And if this XML file mentions gateways, it will automatically create and turn them on. My use case here was that I wanted to create a bunch of VNets in Azure and hook them up – thanks to this script I could get that done in one step. That’s probably an edge case, so I don’t know how the script will work in\u00a0real life scenarios involving gateways.\u00a0<\/li>\n
  2. I wanted to set up a domain easily. For this I do some behind the scenes work like automatically get the Azure VM certificates, add them to the local\u00a0store, connect via WMI, and install the AD DS role and create a domain. That’s pretty cool! It’s not fully tested yet as initially I was thinking of creating all VMs in one fell swoop, but\u00a0yesterday I decided to split this up\u00a0and create per VM. So I have this JSON file now that contains VM definitions (name, IP address, role, etc) and based on this the VM is created and if it has a role I am aware of I can set it up (currently only DC+DNS is\u00a0supported).\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Some links of reference to future me. I had thought of writing blog posts on\u00a0these topics but these links cover them all much better:<\/p>\n