Public preview – Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere – Part 3
Overview
In the two first posts of this series on Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere, we managed to extend Azure governance and management capabilities on VMware-based resources and to demonstrate the creation of a VMware virtual machine from the Azure portal.
If you missed on of the 2 firsts posts:
In the following sections we will see examples of automation solutions that are available to manage VMware resources through Azure tools.
Azure CLI
Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere provides an Azure CLI extension named connectedvmware to manage VMware resources through Azure CLI. The extension documentation provides a full reference of the available commands and arguments.
Here are some examples of what you can achieve with this extension:
List vCenter servers registered in Azure Arc:
1az connectedvmware vcenter list --output table --query "[].{resourceGroup:resourceGroup, name:name, location:location, version:version}"
2ResourceGroup Name Location Version
3--------------- ----------------- ---------- ---------
4arc-RG north-eu-avs-vcsa westeurope 6.7.0
List all inventory items from a vCenter server:
1az connectedvmware vcenter inventory-item list --output table --resource-group "arc-RG" --vcenter "north-eu-avs-vcsa" --query "[].{kind:kind, name:moName}"
2Kind Name
3---------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------
4VirtualNetwork VM-tests-110
5Host esx19-r18.p01.**********************.northeurope.avs.azure.com
6VirtualMachineTemplate Arc-Template
7ResourcePool Resources
8...
List Virtual Machines registered in Azure Arc:
1az connectedvmware vm list --output table --query "[].{resourceGroup:resourceGroup, name:name, location:location, instanceUuid:instanceUuid}"
2ResourceGroup Name Location InstanceUuid
3--------------- ---------- ---------- ------------------------------------
4arc-RG Ubuntu04 westeurope 67bc57b8-6464-4658-8e04-7cc9d6d5cb04
5arc-RG Windows01 westeurope caccc302-e28b-4c70-b2c0-24a614d470e6
6arc-RG Ubuntu03 westeurope 39f8ef01-efd5-4268-88a0-2831bece69e7
7arc-RG Windows03 westeurope f111aa56-f755-494d-9871-72154779792b
8arc-RG Windows02 westeurope 1fba47c2-dba5-4ee3-b295-3bdbd043fbb8
Restart a virtual machine
1az connectedvmware vm restart --name Windows02 --resource-group arc-RG
2 \ Running ..
ARM deployment
According to Microsoft documentation:
Azure Resource Manager is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure account. You use management features, like access control, locks, and tags, to secure and organize your resources after deployment.
ARM is the core engine used by API, UI & Azure tools to manage Azure resources and it provide a declarative Infrastructure-as-code language to deploy and maintain resources: ARM Templates. ARM Templates can use JSON or Bicep syntax.
As other resources, Azure-enabled components of a VMware infrastructure can be managed through ARM and ARM Templates.
Lets see a minimal ARM Template to deploy a VMware virtual machine: Download the Bicep file
1curl https://vuptime.io/images/arc-vmware/vmware-vm-template.bicep > ./vmware-vm-template.bicep
2# edit the file to set proper resources ids and customize your deployment parameters
3
4# Start the deployment
5az deployment group create --name vm-creation --resource-group arc-RG --template-file ./vmware-vm-template.bicep --parameters VMName=Ubuntu08
6
7# Display some information about the deployed VM
8az connectedvmware vm show --output table --resource-group "arc-RG" --name "Ubuntu06" --query "{resourceGroup:resourceGroup, name:name, location:location, instanceUuid:instanceUuid}"
9ResourceGroup Name Location InstanceUuid
10--------------- -------- ---------- ------------------------------------
11arc-RG Ubuntu08 westeurope 18f07c4f-88f9-4cfd-adc7-0dc13007984c
Conclusion
In the last three posts about Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere we have discovered the benefits of managing VMware resources with the help of Azure Resource Manager by using Azure Arc.
By extending Azure governance policy to infrastructure components out of the Azure native scope, it is possible to maintain a global security posture, to easily provide self-service VMware resources and to profit of Azure tools to manage a VMware environment.
As the Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere feature is still in a preview stage, there will be a bunch of changes and enhancements before the Global Availability.
If you missed the 2 first posts of this series:
Credits
Title photo by Birger Strahl on Unsplash