Tag Archives: image

Azure – Linux VM Image Creation – Powershell – With Service Principal/Account

Posted on by
Reply

Overview

I was working on creating generalized VM images for use with scale sets and auto-scaling and I found it rather painful to get the complete set of examples for:

  1. De-provision user/etc from VM.
  2. Use Azure Powershell with a Service principal.
  3. Generalize the VM and create an image.

So, here’s a short mostly-code post on how to do that.

Specific Steps

Fair warning… as far as I know, you can’t use the VM after doing this… but you can create a new copy of it from the image, so that doesn’t matter much.

Before getting to Powershell, run this in your VM to de-provision the most recently set up user account (e.g. I’ll install everything on user “john” created with the Azure VM).  This will remove that user.

sudo waagent -deprovision+user

Now, just run the below command after setting your own values for the 5 variables up top.  This will log in to the RM with the credentials you provide in the pop-up, and then it will stop and generalize the VM, adn tehn create an image from it and store that image in the same resource group as the VM.

$vmName = "YOUR_VM_NAME"
$rgName = "YOUR_RG_NAME"
$location = "YOUR_REGION"
$imageName = "YOUR_IMAGE_NAME"
$tenant = "YOUR_TENANT_ID"

$c = Get-Credential # Input your service principal client-id/secret.
Connect-AzureRmAccount -Credential $c -ServicePrincipal -Tenant $tenant

Stop-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName -Force
Set-AzureRmVm -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName -Generalized
$vm = Get-AzureRmVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $rgName
$image = New-AzureRmImageConfig -Location $location -SourceVirtualMachineId $vm.Id
New-AzureRmImage -Image $image -ImageName $imageName -ResourceGroupName $rgName

Configuration Trouble?

  • If you’re not sure what a service account / principal is or how to create one, the process is quite involved and I highly recommend following one of the many Microsoft-provided tutorials.
  • You can find your tenant ID by clicking the directory + subscription button at the top of the portal OR by hovering over your name/info at the top right corner.
  • The region strings can be tricky; but just Google the Microsoft site if you’re not sure.  A US East 2 example is “EastUS2”.

What’s Next?

Your VM image can now be found in that resource group – go to the portal and see.  You can go into the image in the portal and create a new VM from it, or you can use it to boot up a scale set, etc.