How to create our own VM image in Azure similar to Azure marketplace image.

We all know Azure marketplace have wide variety of images with different combinations like different OS versions, different OS+DB versions and so on. Let’s say we have a customer VUT and all the Virtual Machines created for this customer should have some applications running in them as per their policy or requirement and installing and configuring 100s of them takes some time. So instead of installing the required applications manually every time on all the VMs we can create our own VM Image just like Azure marketplace image and use our VM Image across the company to create new VMs which will have the required applications comes along with image.

Another use can be when we have to create multiple VMs with same configurations like OS disk or both OS and data disks we can use VM Image concept in Azure. This helps in scenarios like all the VMs in an environment should have similar configurations for example all the test VMs should have identical configurations then instead of creating each VM manually and configuring them we can use VM Images.

How to create a Azure VM Image.

In this article we will see how we can create VM Image and in the next article we will see how an VM image can be shared across all the subscriptions of an organization.

 

1. Login to Azure portal and search for ‘Virtual Machine’

 

2. Select the VM for which you want to create an image. In my case I want to create an image for virtual machine named ‘VM1’.

 

3. Click on VM1 and you can see settings of VM1. In the same ‘Overview’ click on ‘Capture’

 

4. ‘Create an image’ page will open and here enter Resource group details where you want create the image and select ‘Yes, share it to a gallery as a VM image version’.

 

5. We can store the images in a Gallery which helps in sharing the image across the company and across the regions. This gallery in simple terms acts as a repository.

 

Create an image gallery to store the VM image. If gallery doesn’t exist already in the resource group click ‘Create new’.

 

6. Give ‘VMIG’ as image gallery name and click ‘OK’.

 

Note: Please remember the warning sign in the above screenshot. Once we capture image of a VM the VM will become unusable.

7. You can check the option ‘Automatically delete this virtual machine after creating the image’ if you want to delete the source VM once the image creation completes. But it is recommended to have the source VM in place even after image creation.

 

 

8. Azure compute gallery supports 2 Operating System States. Generalized and Specialized. Generalized means the machine and user specific information will be removed from the VM before creation of the image and in Specialized state this information will not be removed. Both the options have their own advantages and disadvantages. Specialized state will not have osprofile in it, osprofile helps in passing sensitive information to VM via secrets but advantage of specialized VMs is they can start and run faster than the Generalized VMs. So as per your requirement you can choose suitable option.

 

Here I select Operating system state as ‘Generalized’.

 

9. Create VM image definition at ‘Target VM image definition’. Here I’m giving name as ‘VM1Image’. Select publisher and other details as shown below and click ‘OK’.

 

Image definition basically will have details about the image like OS details, SKU details, VM generation and so on. This information helps in logical group of images and also helps the user who is using this image to identify the type of image being used.

 

                

10. Under Version details, we can give ‘Version number’ for the image, I’m giving as 1.1.0 and leaving other details empty.

 

Versioning of image helps in segregating the images. For example, we can have dedicated version for all production images, another dedicated versioning for development images. Also, versioning helps in identifying the older and newer versions.

 

 

11. ‘End of life date’ this option helps in making user aware if the image they are using is latest one or old one. VMs can still be created after the end-of-life date of the image but it will act as an indicator for the user to know the image is outdated. I’m leaving this as empty.

 

‘Shallow replication’ option creates the image faster as it will not copy the image. This option can be selected if VMs have larger disks as image gets created faster but you can’t deploy large number of VMs concurrently if this option is selected. It is recommended to check this option for development and test environment. I’m leaving this option unchecked.

 

12. We can copy the image we are creating to multiple regions using ‘Replication’ option. To how many regions we want it to be replicated and to which regions it has to be replicated can be configured under ‘Replication’.

 

Under ‘Replication’ I’m giving  ‘Default replica count’ as ‘1’ and selecting ‘(Asia Pacific) Central India’ so the image will be replicated to this region.

 

13. Now click on ‘Review+Create’.

 

14. Wait for the image to be created.

 

15. Once the image creation is completed click on ‘Go to resource’ it will take us to the image we created.

 

16. In ‘Overview’ section of the image you can see 2 options like ‘Create VM’ , ‘Create VMSS’. We can use these buttons to create a new VM or VMSS using the image we created. Click on ‘Create VM’.

 

17. If we click ‘Create VM’ it opens ‘Create a virtual machine’ page and here if you scroll down you can see under ‘Image’ section the image we just created already selected.

 

18. You can fill the other details and simply click on ‘Review+Create’ and a new VM gets created which will have same configuration as the image we used.

 

 

Hope this article helped in learning how to create our own VM image in Azure similar to Azure marketplace image. Share your inputs in comment section below.

 

 

Thanks VV!!