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The Imperfect Lab: Azure Networking – Two Ways

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Around this time last year, I kicked off my “Imperfect Lab” and used it as a story to play around in Azure and get more comfortable with PowerShell. And then I got busy with some other work priorities (as we all do) and I shut down those VMs, with the hopes of dusting them off in the future to continue with more learning.

At any rate, with all the changes to Azure in the last year, it’s really time to reboot the Imperfect Lab and give it a new shine, using some of the fresh new tools – particularly the *new” Portal, Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Azure PowerShell 1.0 and Templates.

Let’s recap what I have to start with (all in “classic” Azure Service Manager)

  • A cloud service and related virtual network
  • Two domain controllers (one using the minimal interface and one running core)
  • One member server that runs the AD Sync service
  • Traditional AD synced to Azure AD

So now where to begin?

When using ARM, it’s no longer possible for the creation of a VM resource without a virtual network, so it seemed fitting for me to start with the network.  It’s also not possible to mix ASM and ARM resources, I’ll be using this network to deploy all the lab VMs I’ll be using in ARM going forward. For those of you who aren’t familiar with old-school Azure, the classic mode (aka Azure Service Manager or ASM) made it possible to create resources in a cloud service without an user-manageable virtual network.

One of the other tasks that was difficult using ASM was programmatically creating and updating networking. It required downloading and editing an XML file and I found that generally distasteful. With ARM, you’ve got two options – straight up PowerShell or an ARM Template.

If you don’t know where to begin with an ARM Template, you can check out this repository of Azure Quickstart Templates. To create a basic network with two subnets, I used this one – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/templates/101-two-subnets/

You can deploy this template using the Azure portal (which will allow you to adjust the parameters to your liking) or you can edit the template to your meet your needs or you can deploy it as is via PowerShell. If you want more details on the ways you can deploy templates, I recommend reading this – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-template-deploy/

The other option is use just vanilla PowerShell from the command line or via ISE. I used the following, which is using PowerShell 1.0:

 $vnetName = "ImperfectRMNet"
$RGroup = "ImperfectRG"
$Location = "West US"

 New-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name $RGroup -Location $Location

 $subnet1 = New-AzureRmVirtualNetworkSubnetConfig -Name SubNet6 -AddressPrefix "192.168.6.0/24"
$subnet2 = New-AzureRmVirtualNetworkSubnetConfig -Name SubNet7 -AddressPrefix "192.168.7.0/24"

 New-AzureRmVirtualNetwork `
 -Name $vnetName `
 -ResourceGroupName $RGroup `
 -Location $Location `
 -AddressPrefix "192.168.6.0/23" `
 -Subnet $subnet1, $subnet2

Take note that with PowerShell 1.0, there is no “Switch-AzureMode” cmdlet and all of the “New” commands include “RM” in the cmdlet somewhere to differentiate between creating classic Azure resources.  There is nothing else to this basic network, no external IP address or load balancer that would normally come default with a cloud service in ASM.