Welcome to Microsoft Mechanics. Coming up on the show, if you're looking for an
easier way to build and automate hosted applications and services whether in
your datacenter via Azure stack or public cloud, we'll take a look Azure
resource management templates a new way to automate orchestration of
required infrastructure resources to get your applications or services running
inside Azure. We'll look at what templates can do and how they work, where
you can find hundreds of templates from the IT community and ultimately how all
of this can end up saving time
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined in the garage today by Corey Sanders who basically runs the team for
all of Azure computer. Welcome Corey. Rick, it's great to be here. So we announced support for IaaS
inside of Azure Resource Manager Templates way back in May and lots of
focus was made about how it makes it easier to develop apps and that sort of
stuff but something we haven't talked an awful lot about broadly is really
what does it do for the IT side of the house?
What problems are we trying to solve for in there?
What we're trying to do is really resolve a lot of the barriers and complexities about
deploying infrastructure based solutions. This goes well beyond some of the
PowerShell based solutions that you've seen in the past where you automate a
bunch of deployments, with what we built here we've made it so that with a single
click you can deploy a large template with a plethora of resources this can be
things like storage compute and networking resources but it also has services like
web sites to be able to deploy all these components together very very easily but
we don't stop just there. We can also take those same templates and you can
deploy them both in the Azure public cloud but you can also bring them down
into private infrastructure in the up and coming Azure Stack and so with that same
template with that same exact experience you can deploy all the complexity of
those infrastructure components in all of those different environments to get you
started quickly we have a set of pre-configured templates which I'll show
you actually one today for SharePoint. So I'm going to log right in here to the
portal experience and click straight into marketplace the fastest way to get going
and so clicking here, and like I promised earlier, I'm actually going to search for
SharePoint and so here I've got SharePoint and because I want to this to always stay up and
and always be available I'm going to go ahead and click the HA Farm
and then from there I can go and configure everything I need to configure
Now what is that template actually going to end up doing?
So to deploy SharePoint there's a lot of
things that need to happen as you probably know. The first step of course
is you need to deploy your Active Directory, of course, you need to get your
identity set up and you need to configure that before really anything
else can happen and so what this template will end up doing, it will configure
Active Directory not just once but twice
it'll configure the first one the primary domain controller
and then it will launch the backup to make sure that you have that HA experience
once that's fully configured then we'll move on to SQL to get your
back-end data so we'll have a SQL VM a 2nd SQL VM and then the witness to make
sure that you can set up this always on cluster and once that's deployed then
you go to SharePoint. We'll set of the app server and the web server and you
finally have a full farm with all the users and roles configured on them but you may need
Now that's really hard to get done in PowerShell but how hard is it to do inside a template instead?
It's really just a few clicks and really a quick quick few steps.
Let me walk you through exactly what I'm gonna do here
so first as part of basics, i'll pick the SharePoint farm name and I'll pick the
research group and that's going to be the grouping for everything going to deploy here.
[typing]
Now they've gone to those steps I'm ready to go hit launch.
Now before you hit launch though, can you actually show me what the template looks like?
I sure can, I can go straight here and hit download template
and it makes that JSON file right available for me to launch in notepad
and so from here you can see that I've actually got the entire configuration
setup that I mentioned before. What I'll end up walking through is like I said first it
launches the Active Directory domain controller and it'll configure the
storage account to configure the NIC availability sets so on and configure that
whole thing and configure that twice and set up for you. Now here you can see the
depends on section this is section that defines the ordering so Active
Directory needs to finish first and not just finish deploying the VM but
actually configuring DNS so that you have the name for how the servers are all
going to connect to each other and so only when that's finished you see this
depends on will start actually launching the SQL always on cluster
similarly once the SharePoint farm VMs start going those also have a depends on to
make sure that only after the SQL always on cluster is done will we then
deploy SharePoint farm VM. So it creates as much parallelism as the app
can allow and then I just hit ok and I can launch the entire template
now to show you what this actually looks like I've spun one up ahead of time just so you
can see and so I'll jump right into this farm and you can see straight from here
I've got all of the components and I talked about. Active Directory deployed
I've got SQL, I've got SharePoint ready to launch and so I can go in I can
take a look at the VMs all the aspects that are deployed make sure they're
healthy etcetera and so what I can also do is add tags to this is.
What tags allows me to do is they allow me to both track what's running in
my machines and also allows me to check it in the bill and so when I put a tag
on the SharePoint farm I'll be able to see in the bill how much this is running
and I can go make sure that I talk to people if they're spending a little bit
more than they should, if you know what I mean, so I can go right and I can
select the tag and type it in and configure whatever names I want and
apply that straight to my virtual machine
If I compare that to what I would have to do
using PowerShell this would require me to come up with all the logic
and all the PS1 and scripts and everything else to be able to do
Azure with ARM templates eliminates all that sort of stuff. Where do I get started?
Absolutely it does eliminate all that and we've made it so it's very easy to
get going. You can go straight into the Azure.com website and go into resources
and go templates underneath that. Here we've got more than a hundred and eighty
templates for you to be able to go in and learn how the system works you can
click through you can find things elasticsearch cluster with virtual
machines go in and here you see the templates available but down to the
bottom three simple lines from PowerShell to be able to deploy this
template and away you go
What about access and security? In a services model access controls are really important what can
we do with those inside of resource manager?
Yeah absolutely one of the
beautiful parts about being able to configure deploy all of these as a
single template you can also lock them down all as a single template. So here I
go straight into my common networking pool that have already deployed and I'm
going here and I actually wanna maybe allow you to have access to this which
makes me uncomfortable but I'm gonna do it today and I'll go in to users and
I'll add and you can see I can select a role in so there's a bunch of different
roles that I can do go, read only, contributor, etcetera and all of these are
defined for you to be able to use quickly. So network contributors what I'm
going to do and because you're in my domain I can find you and there you are
waiting for me to select you and so with that I can add one user network
contributor to this object and away I go and so with that it should
successfully add you and there you are
What's the vision for Azure Resource Manager going forward?
So this is a unified model that allows you to deploy
and orchestrate very complex solutions in a very simple way whether it be on
on prem or in the cloud and the beauty of this is that we've started off with a
huge list of templates for you to get going so you can learn from solutions
either we built or our partners have built to really get going very quickly and
build whatever solution you may imagine
That's great man! Thanks for the overview.
Now we're just about at a time
you get started today with QuickStart templates. Keep checking back the
Microsoft Mechanics every Wednesday or as news breaks thanks for watching
Microsoft Mechanics
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