Azure on CloudBolt Documentation

Provisioning

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Built-in parameters are added to each Azure environment when CMP imports its region, and appear on the environment’s Azure Parameters tab. Create optional parameters where you need them: on a group, an environment, or a server.

Authentication and passwords

Azure requires credentials for every new server. The Authentication parameter selects the method: a password, or an SSH key on Linux.

Azure Password must be 8 to 123 characters with a number, an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a special character, and no spaces. Windows servers always need one, and there is no default.
Azure Key pair name selects an existing Azure SSH public key to install on the server. You connect with the matching private key. Linux only.

Azure does not accept root, admin, or Administrator as a username. If an order carries one of those, or no username, CMP uses the server owner’s CMP username instead and notes the change in the job log.

Azure Load Balancer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud Management Platform (CMP) creates and deletes the load balancer, and adds or removes servers from its backend pool as the tier scales up and down. Any other configuration is done in the Azure portal.

Prerequisites

An Azure resource handler with at least one region and one image imported.
An Azure environment with at least one OS build.

Add a load balancer to a blueprint

A load balancer is a build item on a blueprint, alongside the server tier it balances. These steps build the simplest case, one server tier plus one load balancer. To balance more than one tier, add a server tier build item for each.

Resize VMs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Resizing is a server action named Resize VM, which Cloud Management Platform (CMP) enables by default. It runs against Azure and AWS servers.

Which sizes are offered

An Azure VM size, such as Standard_D2s_v3, sets the CPUs, memory, and disk types available to a server. Not every size can be resized to any other size, and what is possible depends on where the VM is deployed. See Microsoft’s documentation on sizes for Azure virtual machines.

Modify or add disks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Which of the two applies depends on the server’s existing disks. Servers built with managed disks take a Storage type on each new disk; servers built against a storage account take an Azure Storage Account instead, and Cloud Management Platform (CMP) creates one if not specified.

Add a disk

Open the server and select the Disks tab.
Select Add.
Enter a Disk Size (GB) and set OS Disk Host Caching.
Set Storage type or Azure Storage Account, whichever the dialog offers.
Submit the dialog.

Add appears only on an active server in an assigned environment, on a technology that supports adding disks, and only for users with permission to add disks.

Import images

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Import images from the handler’s Images tab, which lists each imported region and the images already available in it. Import the regions you need on the Regions tab first: an image can only be imported into a region Cloud Management Platform (CMP) knows about.

Import public images

Azure publishes a large number of images, so CMP imports them in two steps. The Fetch and Cache Available Azure Images rule caches Azure’s offering, and Import Images on the Images tab picks from that cache. Until the rule has run at least once, the import dialog has nothing to show.

Azure VM OS Guest Patching

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud Management Platform (CMP) reads the VM’s current mode from Azure and offers only the modes that the VM can move to. Refer to Microsoft’s documentation on Automatic Guest Patching for more information.

Enable OS Guest Patching

The action is not installed with CMP. Import it from the Content Library first.

In the main menu, select Library, then filter Content Type to Server Actions.
Locate the OS Guest Patching server action, then select the Download icon and choose Import.
Go to an Azure server. OS Guest Patching appears with the server’s other actions, above the tabs. If the server has more than six actions, the rest are under More.
Select OS Guest Patching.
Select a New Patch Mode. Available modes depend on the Azure VM OS image and VM settings.
Select Change Mode.

Patch modes

Mode	Who applies patches
`AutomaticByPlatform`	Azure.
`AutomaticByOS`	The operating system.
`Manual`	The user.
`ImageDefault`	Determined by the OS image’s settings.

New Patch Mode never offers the current mode, and offered modes depend on the operating system. For Windows they also depend on whether the VM has automatic updates enabled, which Azure sets when the VM is created and cannot be changed afterwards.

Required Azure permissions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud Management Platform (CMP) works entirely through Azure Resource Manager. Register the application as described in Configure the Azure portal, then assign it one of the roles below at subscription scope. A role scoped to individual resource groups cannot read what CMP needs from the subscription as a whole: existing servers to discover, available regions and virtual machine sizes, stored SSH public keys, and cost.

Contributor

Assign the built-in Contributor role to the application at subscription scope. It covers everything CMP does: creating and deleting virtual machines, disks, network interfaces, security groups, public IP addresses, storage accounts, availability sets, and resource groups; power actions; resizing; snapshots; load balancers; tagging; cost; and utilization metrics.

Azure resource handler for multiple cloud subscriptions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Create one Azure resource handler as described in Azure, then import the rest. Cloud Management Platform (CMP) reads the subscriptions the application can access and creates a handler for each one you select, reusing that handler’s credentials.

Create a custom role in Azure

Contributor on each subscription covers everything CMP does; see Required Azure permissions. To grant less than that, create a custom role with the permissions CMP uses and assign it.