Manage virtual machines with the Azure CLI

Exercise - Create a virtual machine

az vm create, this will create a VM in a resource group. There are four parameters which must be supplied:

• --resource-group: resource group that will own the machine

• --name: name of the vm, must be unique within the resource group

• --image: OS for the vm

• --location: region which to place the VM

Useful to add --verbose to see progress while the VM is being created. To automatically return to the commandline use --no-wait

az vm create \
  --resource-group learn-4f4d525c-6fad-4b50-99cb-7606d6c57647 \
  --location westus \
  --name SampleVM \
  --image UbuntuLTS \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --generate-ssh-keys \
  --verbose

To find help for a specific command, use --help.

az vm --help will provide a list of commands and _subcommands which can be utilized with az vm.

Exercise - Explore other VM images

The following will provide a list of offline images: az vm image list --output table will produce a list of available VM images.

We can additionally use az vm image list --output table --all to provide an up-to-date list. There are filters we can use when viewing this list to try and condense it to certain images we are interested in using.

Available filters:

• --publisher

• --sku

• --offer

Exercise - Query system and runtime information about the VM

Get the list of existing VMs regardless of resource group:

• az vm list

Format the results from a command:

• az vm list --output table, default format is json

• additional options are jsonc (colorized JSON) and tsv (tab seperated values)

Get a list of ip addresses for operational VMs

• az vm list-ip-addresses --output table

Add filters to queries with JMESPath

Using JMESPath is a means to filter JSON queries and receive specific data you're looking for, based off an array.

Filters you Azure CLI queries

az vm show \
    --resource-group learn-4f4d525c-6fad-4b50-99cb-7606d6c57647 \
    --name SampleVM \
    --query "osProfile.adminUsername"

The query values are case-sensitive

The following will pull the size assigned to the specific VM.

$ az vm show \
> -g $rgroup \
> -n testVM \
> --query hardwareProfile.vmSize
"Standard_DS1_v2"

Exercise - Start and stop your VM with the Azure CLI

Stop a VM

az vm stop --name "VMName" --resource-group "resource_group"

Get the power state of the VM:

az vm get-instance-view \
    --name SampleVM \
    --resource-group learn-8a9e674d-1e48-4a9b-9200-e6e3fd49d17c \
    --query "instanceView.statuses[?starts_with(code, 'PowerState/')].displayStatus" -o tsv

Resources for review

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/reference-index