Best way to automate creation of hundreds of servers in Azure from a machine image?
Novice here looking for advice. Thanks
Posted Aug 29, 2023, 11:45 PM UTC
19
There's probably two distinct parts to this. There's the provisioning of the VM objects in Azure, and then there's configuring them.
For the first you can use your standard infrastructure as code tools like Bicep or Terraform. From memory both have looping and/or count style constructs where you could easily spin up websvr01 to websvr99. The only issue you might run into is API limits.
The second half would be what is typically considered configuration management, which would be additional configuration you need to do outside of what's in your machine image. Standard options for that are Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Powershell DSC.
1
Just my two cents
I understand from a post below it is part of it a on premises migration to the cloud ?
In that case I figure they have different sources specs I guess
Perhaps Azure migrate is your best friend then
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/how-to-set-up-appliance-vmware
The VM ware one for example
Just create a assessment Let it delta and then cut over per machine
It's pretty nifty
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Hm. I have to literally fight for each quota limit increase.. Hundreds of servers *speaking in dreams *
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Do those servers need to maintain state? Or are they like web servers.
Both
For stateless, scale sets are your friend. You can create a 100 servers at a time. For stateful servers, we need some more requirements. How quickly do you need them spun up?
Spinning up new vm's in Azure so we can begin migrating off of an onprem environment. Need to spin up a few hundred then configure DB and Apps, etc. Green field deployment.
Take some time as well and discover of these apps running on vms can run on something else (web apps, container, function etc) moving VMs to the cloud is the least effective way to use Azure. They will appreciate your money though! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/paths/migrate-application-workloads-data-azure/