How To Automate Your Development Virtual Machines In Azure

Microsoft offers more than 200 cloud services. Azure Automation is a very powerful service in the Microsoft Cloud to automate other services.

For example Azure Automation can help in order to automate

• Auto space provisioning/ Backup Restore space
• VM’s availability in specific hours (On Prem/Cloud)
• Notify users of underutilized VMs and perform remediation
• Alert on a VM then turn on tracing, collect logs, upload to Azure Storage and make available in Visual Studio for troubleshooting
• Deploy a new service to Azure and configure the end points for CPU and Memory alerts

There are many things you can automate but below I will automate one scenario

Scenario: Azure Dev VM's required only in office hours (9:00 AM - 5:00 PM). That automation will save your VM consumption time significantly.

You don't need to Start/Stop manually VM's daily.

Here is step by step guide

1. Open Azure Portal with URL https://portal.azure.com
   
   
   
   
2. Click on more services
   
   
   
   
3. Search with name "Automation" you will found (Automation Account)
   
   
   
   
4. Click "Add" to create new "Automation Account"
   
   
   
   
5. Provide necessary details like name, Subscription, Resource Group, Location etc as in example its "TariqAzureAutomationAccount"
   
   
   
   
6. After you press create button you can see bell sign for status -- either created or not yet
   
   
   
   
7. In below image Automation Account created
   
   
   
   
8. Click on created automation account for details and here you can see "RunBooks", Click on "RunBooks"
   
   
   
   
9. This will redirect to page shown below to create new "RunBook"
   
   
   
   
10. Provide details like Name, Type as shown below
    
    
    
    
11. After some seconds you can see "RunBook" created
    
    
    
    
12. Click on newly created RunBook as in my example is "MyTestRunBook", click Edit button
    
    
    
    
13. This is called Canvas where you can write code, here I pasted Connection String. This will handle authentication with Automation Run as account
    
    
    
    $Conn = Get-AutomationConnection -Name AzureRunAsConnection
    Add-AzureRMAccount -ServicePrincipal -Tenant $Conn.TenantID `
    -ApplicationId $Conn.ApplicationID -CertificateThumbprint $Conn.CertificateThumbprint
    
    
14. On the left side you can find PowerShell commands available for further actions.
    
    
    
    
15. In my example we want to start Azure Development VM, so selected "Start VM" command by doing right click and adding to canvas.
    
    
    
    
16. This will look like this.
    
    
    
    
17. Put your VM name and Resource Group Name as shown below.
    
    
    
    
18. After saving, click on start
    
    
    
    
19. After some moments this will show you status like below
    
    
    
    
20. Now save and click Publish
    
    
    
    
21. Once you click Publish option it will give you an alert
    
    
    
    
22. Window will look like below and you can set schedule for your job
    
    
    
    
23. Click on Schedule in order to create new schedule
    
    
    
    
24. In the below example name of schedule is "StartDailyVMs" and start time is 9:00 AM
    
    
    
    
25. You can see schedule has been created and "Status" is On
    
    
    
    
26. Schedule is already done and job will be executed next day morning at 9:00AM but here you run job forcefully also
    
    
    
    
27. After job I can see the status of my existing virtual machine "TestVM1" is changed from "Stopped" to "Starting"