Hi again! As you may have already heard, we have launched a few new features at Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2015 to help improve the VM deployment experience using the Resource Manager stack!
Let’s start by going to the Marketplace in the Azure Preview Portal. Just look for + (New), Compute, and Marketplace.
As you probably already know, you will have access to all Virtual Machines hosted in the platform through Marketplace. You simply need to select the tile representing the product you are interested in and the stack to which to deploy. Making a stack decision is now more straightforward and in line with the create flow; it no longer requires a filter selection in Marketplace.
Let’s use ‘Wowza Streaming Engine for Linux: BYOL’ as an example; select this product in the UI and then ‘Use the Resource Manager stack’ option from the drop down menu.
Next, by clicking the Create button, you will be prompted through the new wizard style create VM experience, which you may notice is a bit different. This new experience reflects a lot of feedback we have received for improvements in the create experience. We hope this experience makes it easier for you to deploy VMs in the Azure Preview Portal.
All third party applications, including the Wowza SKU we just tried out, require an explicit purchase and acknowledgement of the end user license agreement and price associated with software running in the Marketplace VM. For those of you who have already worked with Marketplace VMs, you may remember that to acknowledge terms and prices and make an explicit purchase, you first had to deploy a VM from the Azure Preview Portal, before being able to deploy it programmatically. We realize this is more cumbersome than needed and have released a new programmatic enablement experience to simplify the overall deployment of Marketplace VMs when using REST APIs, ARM Templates, Azure PowerShell, or Azure CLI.
While we can still go ahead and deploy a virtual machine from the Azure Preview Portal to enable the SKU for programmatic access, we will now focus more on the new link just below the Create button, reading “Want to deploy programmatically? Get Started”.
Let’s click on this link and see where it takes us. As you may have suspected, it opens up a blade that allows me to first review terms and prices for the SKU and then enable it for programmatic use per subscription. A screenshot of the blade can be seen below.
If you scroll down, you get to the full list of subscriptions to which you have access.
Enabling programmatic deployment is as simple as first clicking “Enable” on each of the subscriptions you want and then clicking save. You may not always have the permission to enable the SKU for programmatic access, since you will need to have at least the ‘Contributor’ role for that subscription.
To close the window, you do need to click the ‘x’ at the top. It will not close automatically and you do not want to click discard, since that will discard your changes. At this point, you are ready to deploy Wowza Streaming Engine for Linux: BYOL programmatically without any problems. You can find more information on how to deploy virtual machines programmatically in the following articles: Deploy and Manage Virtual Machines using Azure Resource Manager Templates and PowerShell and Creating a Virtual Machine Running Linux.
Note that not every SKU in the marketplace will have the ability to enable programmatic access. Microsoft applications, like SQL Server and SharePoint and base operating system images, like Ubuntu, SUSE, and Windows Server will not require this enablement, since they are enabled by default.
At some point in time, I am sure you will be interested in seeing what is already enabled for a particular subscription to do broader management. On the left had side of the Azure Preview Portal, click on the Billing icon and select the subscription in which you are interested.
From there, scroll down and find the Marketplace tile.
This will open a blade that shows all enabled SKUs. You can see the SKU we just enabled for one of my subscriptions as well as additional SKUs I have enabled in the past.
As mentioned earlier, deployment of a SKU from the Azure Preview Portal will automatically enable programmatic deployment, so do not be surprised that when you check this screen, you will already have enabled SKUs even if you have not explicitly enabled them with this new feature. It also does not matter what stack you chose to deploy to, because enablement is agnostic of the compute stack. Please do note, that someone who has contributor access to a resource group in your subscription to which they deploy a marketplace virtual machine, will also enable the SKU for your subscription.
I hope you have found this blog post helpful!
Let me know if you have any questions,
Christine