Creating VMs, VNET, Subnets, And Load Balancers Using Azure Resource Manager Templates

Using the ARM Template Deployment using PowerShell, we are going to deploy 2 Virtual Machines under a Load Balancer and configures Load Balancing rules for the VMs. Here in this demo, I have used the template available on the link here:

https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/201-2-vms-loadbalancer-lbrules

This template allows you to create 2 Virtual Machines under a Load Balancer and configure a Load Balancing rule on Port 80. This template also deploys a Storage Account, a Virtual Network, Public IP Addresses, Availability Set and Network Interfaces.

In this template, we use the resource loops capability to create the Network Interfaces and Virtual Machines.

You can get more such templates from Azure's GitHub from the link here: - https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates

So now let us go ahead with the demo. We will have two files. One will be the azuredeploy.json file and the other one will be azuredeploy.parameters.json file.

The parameters file will pass certain runtime parameters to the azuredeploy.json file.

Here, I have got both of my files from GitHub. Next, after this, we need to check if these files have valid JSON code or not. So, we need to lint these two files.

You can go to www.jsonlint.com to check if your JSON code is valid or not. Here I have checked mine and I am good to go.

Next, you need to login to your Azure account using PowerShell.

After that, we need to create a Resource Group. Run this command to create a new Resource Group and it will get created instantly.

Now, it is time to check if our template and the parameters file are good to deploy or not.

Run this command to see if the template and the parameters files are okay. It is okay, it will return nothing. No result is a good result.

If I add something to my main azuredeploy.json file that is not in the parameters file, let us see what happens.

Then if I run the test command over my template it tells me that the template is invalid. Undo the changes in the template file. Now, let us make some changes to the Parameters.json file.

Right now it looks something like this.

I have made a slight change to the value of dnsName. Let us see what happens next.

It tells me that it is an InvalidTemplateDeployment. Now apparently, you cannot actually figure out what the error is from PowerShell. It just gives you some tracking ID. But I know that the values in the parameters file accepts only small characters and not the capital ones.

But there is a way where you can debug your command and see what the error is. Just add -debug at the end of your test command.

You will be able to find the error down there. So undo the name changes in the parameters file now.

And it should run fine again. But, keep in mind that this doesn't mean that there won't be any runtime errors. There might be those as well. But as of now, we are good to go.

Now, running this command will start the deployment of the template. The PowerShell will remain blank for a while until everything gets deployed. You can close PowerShell and it will still continue the deployment but you will not get the report of deployment.

You can see that it has deployed all of the resources except my VMs. The reason behind that is that the VM sizes mentioned are not available in the region I have selected.

This is what the runtime error looks like.

In the portal under the Deployments blade of my resource, it shows me a failure.

Since the two VMs didn't get deployed, it is showing me failed.

In my azuredeploy.json file, I have changed the value of vmSize to Standard_D2_v2. Now it shouldn't show me any errors. So now I will redeploy it with another name i.e. KTDemoDeploy2.

Inside the Deployment Tab, you can see that it is now deploying our resources. You can delete the older deployment since it had failed to deploy successfully.

It has deployed almost everything but it is still showing that it is deploying. That is because it is doing some backend configuration like connecting the NICs with VMs and other such stuff.

In the portal, it now shows succeed.

And in PowerShell as well, it shows succeed.

Hence, this is how you can deploy the Azure Resource Manager Templates.