Visual Studio Release Manager for Azure VMs

Visual Studio Release Manager is a great solution for automating multi-stage deployment and managing the release process. As part of the recent TechEd announcements, Azure announced the integration of Visual Studio Release Manager Extension with Azure Ibiza Portal using the Azure VM  Extension model. For anyone who is already using Release Management(RM) , this extension will simplify the bootstrapping process. The general overview of RM and the licensing information can be found here.

Here is a quick snapshot overview:

To enable Azure Virtual Machines to participate in the release management process,  PowerShell DSC &  Windows Management Framework needs to be configured on each VM. The Release Manager Extension takes care of this. To do this, browse to your VM in Azure Ibiza portal and add the Release Management Extension. Once its configured, the Virtual Machine can be managed from the Release Manager console . For detailed documentation on this process, please refer to the blog post here.

To automate this, run the following cmdlets after downloading the Azure PowerShell cmdlets from here:

$publicConfig = ConvertTo-Json -Depth 8 @{

    SasToken               = ""

    ModulesUrl             = ""

    ConfigurationFunction  = ""

    Properties             = @{

    }
    }

$vm = get-AzureVM -ServiceName $svcName -Name $name

Set-AzureVMExtension -ExtensionName DSC -Publisher Microsoft.Powershell -Version 1.* -PublicConfiguration $publicConfig  -VM $vm
Update-AzureVM -VM $vm.VM -ServiceName $svcName -Name $name

Hope you find this integration of RM with Azure Portal useful.  The Release Manager team is working on providing a richer/deeper integration to manage the deployment process on Azure, in their future releases. Stay tuned!