Azure VM Image
Following one of my earlier posts, about Azure Managed Disks, lets see how easy it is to create an Azure VM Image from an Azure VM that uses Managed Disks.
The first step it to Sysprep/Generalize the source VM. Otherwise the VM that will be created will not start. Select Generalize and “Shutdown”.
After that wait the VM to shut down and go to the Azure Porta, at the VM’s blade and click “Capture”.
Now, the “Create Image” blade will open. Enter a name, select a Resource Group and choose if the source VM will be deleted or not. Then press create.
As soon as the Image is created you can find it at the “Images” service.
Now lets create a VM from our Image
Click the image name from the Images Blade to open the desired image Blade and just press “Create VM”.
Of course at the image’s blade we can see if the image is Windows or Linux, if it has any Data Disks and the Location.
After clicking the “Create VM” the classic “Create virtual machine” wizard will start, just like any other Virtual Machine creation. You will notice the difference at the final step that shows the name of your image instead of the VM’s OS.
If you want to automate the process of creating an Azure VM from your images you can use Azure Template. You can find a quick start template at Azure’s GitHub repository.
Create a Virtual Machine from a User Image: https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/101-vm-from-user-image
Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.
