Azure Automation-Onboarding a Windows Server Node (Azure VM)

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In: ARM, Automation, Azure, PowerShell, Windows Server 2012
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This is the part 2 of the Azure Automation DSC blog series. Last post I gave a brief introduction to what is Azure Automation and methods how we can achieve DSC. This post I’ll walk-through how to onboarding a Windows Server Node (Azure VM ) to Azure Automation DSC.

Before We Start

  • Need to have a Azure Subscription.
  • Permission to create and modify Azure Automation Account.
  • Permission to manage Azure VM.

First Create a Azure Automation Account if you haven’t create yet

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Click Add to create new account

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Give a account name, resource group & location then click create

Now we create a automation account next we need the DSC configurations, we can add DSC configuration scripts to automation account.

Following is the sample DSC code I used for this demo

Configuration FileResourceDemo
{
    Node 'localhost'
      {
         File CreateFile {
         DestinationPath = 'c:\text.txt'
         Ensure = 'Present'
         Contents = "Hello World !!!!"
         }
      }
}

Above code ensure that there is a file named and text.txt and it contains “Hello World !!!!”. So when we apply this DSC configuration to a node Azure Automation account constantly check whether the Node is complaint with above configuration. If the Node has any changes it revert back to the configuration as DSC script.

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Now we added the DSC configuration and it shows as bellow.

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Now Lets on-board a VM.

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Next configure the registration data. In this pane we select which DSC configuration should apply to this VM.

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After click ok it start to install the PowerShell DSC extension to VM. We can see the extension as below

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In VM We can see the extension installed

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So lets verify the configurations we mentioned in the script are applied to the VM. I login to the VM and open the file explore then I can see the text file I mentioned in the DSC created.

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LCM (Local Configuration Manager ) periodically check the desired state of the configurations are complied and if its not complaint it get the configuration from the Automation account and apply it.

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