Tag: Azure

Static Internal IP Address for Windows Azure VMs

~ Anton Khitrenovich ~ 1 Comment

WinAzureOn the same day I published my Azure Newbie Notes post, which mentioned, among other things, the inability to set static IP address for VMs, things changed a bit. Then-new v0.7.3 of Windows Azure PowerShell added several cmdlets that allow handling of static internal IP addresses. This came without any official announcements, but was covered in several blog posts on TechNet. No doubt this is a must-have feature – many services just won’t operate correctly without constant IP address, with DNS server is probably the most notable among them. Unfortunately, configuring static IP address via web-based Azure Management Console is not available yet.

[ Here you can find brief explanation on how to install and configure Azure PowerShell, along with the some related links. ]

Several posts and articles with useful samples related to static IP addresses:

Here and in the samples below “MyVM” is the name of the virtual machine we want to update and “MyCloudService” is the name of the cloud service this VM belongs to.

Probably the most useful sample nowadays is one that shows how to take existing VM and set it to have a static IP address. Although most of the articles say you have to use an available (that is, free) IP address, you can use the same IP address that is already assigned to the specific VM. Also, pay attention that Update-AzureVM cmdlet reboots the VM. Note that in the sample run below I’m configuring MyVM to the same IP address it already has. Of course, it makes sense to run the first part of the command alone first to make sure you are going to update the right VM.

Get-AzureVM -ServiceName MyCloudService -Name MyVM | Set-AzureStaticVNetIP -IPAddress 10.0.0.100 | Update-AzureVM

Another useful command is to check whether a VM already has a static IP address configured or not. For VMs with static IP address configured, this IP will be displayed, otherwise only the diagnostic output of the first part will be shown.

Get-AzureVM -ServiceName MyCloudService -Name MyVM | Get-AzureStaticVNetIP

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Windows Azure PowerShell

~ Anton Khitrenovich ~ 1 Comment

Windows Azure PowerShellWindows Azure PowerShell is a module that provides cmdlets to manage Azure through Windows PowerShell.

Here you can find an official documentation on how to install and configure Azure PowerShell. But in a nutshell, there are two simple steps.

Step 1:
Download and run Microsoft Web Platform installer, which will guide you through the Windows Azure PowerShell installation. The process is a bit lengthy and includes some heavy Microsoft components, such as IIS Express and SQL Server Express. Note that a system restart may (will?) be required during the installation, so prepare accordingly.

Step 2:
Open Azure PowerShell and configure it to use your Azure account, as explained in the documentation.
Two methods are available – via your Azure credentials (with session available for the next 12 hours) and certificate-based. The former did not work in my case, resulting in some strange error, so I had no choice but to go with certificates option. Surprisingly, the setup went extremely easy. First, download your settings file with Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet. Second, import the resulting file with Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet and delete the file from the local system.

The sources for Microsoft Azure PowerShell cmdlets are available on GitHub, as well as the changelog.