In this final part of our series we walk through the PowerShell script that connects to Azure, creates the resource group, and then launches the creation of the lab environment.  We also walk through the final couple of manual steps required to complete the lab setup https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart6/player   The series landing page on "Full of … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – The PowerShell Script and completing the build (Part 6)

In the 6th part of our series we look at some of the remaining requirements for our lab environment, and how we automatically launched a PowerShell script on each of our virtual machines to perform the final machine-dependent tasks. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart5/player The series landing page on "Full of I.T.": https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabBlog “The Links” document : https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabLinks Kevin’s … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Additional Automations (Part 5)

Our lab environment requires that several sample scripts and other utilities be available on several of the member servers.  But how do we get those files onto the C: drive?  In this video I'll show how that was accomplished. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart4/player   The series landing page on "Full of I.T.": https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabBlog “The Links” document : https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabLinks … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Copy down files (Part 4)

In the fourth part of our series we look at how to automatically join the three other virtual machines to the contoso.com domain, again using an custom extension in our Azure Resource Manager template. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart3/player The series landing page on "Full of I.T.": https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabBlog “The Links” document : https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabLinks Kevin’s GitHub lab base repository : … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Domain-Join the member servers (Part 3)

It's not enough just to create a new virtual machine.  Our lab environment requires a pre-configured domain, and so in part 2 we find and utilize and extension that automatically configures one of our virtual machines as the first domain controller in the lab "contoso.com" domain. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart2/player   The series landing page on "Full of … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Create a Domain Controller (Part 2)

In the second part of this series we discuss the components that make up the schema for JSON-based Azure Resource Manager templates.  We also look at some of the initial building blocks that our example creates, such as the networking objects and Azure storage required. https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/FullofIT/ARMPart1/player The series landing page on "Full of I.T.": https://aka.ms/AZInfraLabBlog … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Working with JSON (Part 1)

In part 0, I introduce the purpose for this series, which is a walk-through of how I learned to automate the creation of an Azure-hosted lab environment (Storage, 4 VMs, network, NICs, etc.) using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.  I show the actual launch of the automation, discuss the various tools involved, and introduce the … Continue reading How I automated a hands-on-lab infrastructure – Introduction (Part 0 of 7)