De-provision / Re-provision your Azure Lab Environment via PowerShell

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Your functional SharePoint lab environment is now complete, but if you’re like me, you won’t be using this lab environment 24×7 around-the-clock. As long as the virtual machines are provisioned, they will continue to accumulate compute hours against your Windows Azure account regardless of virtual machine state – even in a shutdown state!

We can leverage the Windows Azure PowerShell module to de-provision our lab virtual machines when not in use and re-provision our lab virtual machines when we need them again in just 5-10 minutes.

Launch PowerShell for Windows Azure. Right-click on the Windows PowerShell shortcut on the desktop and select Run as Administrator to launch Windows PowerShell with Administrative Rights.

Run the following commands:

# Set the Windows PowerShell Execution Policy

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

# Import the Windows Azure PowerShell Module

Import-Module Azure

# Download and Import a Windows Azure publish settings file

Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile

Internet Explorer will be opened automatically and settings file will be downloaded:

Save it in your local machine.

Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile “”

#type the name of your VMs

$myVMs = @(“angellab001″,”angellabAD01”)

Foreach ($myVM in $myVMs) {

           Stop-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -Name $myVM

          $ExportPath = “C:\AzureStuff\ExportAzureVM-$myVM.xml”

          Export-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -name $myVM -Path $ExportPath

}

You can create a PowerShell script with these commands and run it from the console.

Ensure that all export files have been created correctly:

Now you can proceed to de-provisioning your lab environment. You need to run the following command (you can create a script and run it from console too):

# De-provisioning your lab

$myVMs = @(“angellab001″,”angellabAD01”)

Foreach ( $myVM in $myVMs ) {

Remove-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -name $myVM

}

Before

After

Just the cloud services (Affinity Group, Virtual Network, Storage Account) exist, VMs have been removed.

To re-provisioning your lab environment you have to run the following commands or create a script:

#type your virtual network name

$myVNet = “angellabnet01”

#type your VMs name

$myVMs = @(“angellab001″,”angellabAD01”)

#type your storage account

$myStorageAccount = “angellabstore01”

Get-AzureSubscription |

       Set-AzureSubscription -CurrentStorageAccount $myStorageAccount

Foreach ($myVM in $myVMs ) {

           $ExportPath = “C:\AzureStuff\ExportAzureVM-$myVM.xml”

          Import-AzureVM -Path $ExportPath | New-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM –VNetName $myVNet

           Start-AzureVM -ServiceName $myVM -name $myVM

}

Take into account the order of the VMs in $myVMs vector. If you have an Active Directory server, it should be the first one to re-provision before of the rest of servers that are joined to the domain. Or if you have a SharePoint server + a SQL server, SQL server should be re-provisioned before the SharePoint one because this contains the SharePoint configuration databases needed to get SharePoint server running.