Just Another IT Blog

It's time to share some of my experiences, crazy ideas, tips and tricks !!!

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We are all always looking for ways to be more efficient, and maintain compliance and consistency across all disciplines.
Image/Template management is one of them.

It takes time to customize a corporate image to adhere to design principles hardening and best practices to provide overall quality, security, and effectiveness for your applications.

In today's multi-cloud environment, consuming services from different locations is just ordinary, instead of recreate those images in each location why not disseminate your golden images to all of those  remote locations of yours?

VMware solved it a long time ago with Content Library, which could stores VM Templates, ISO images and text files so those golden templates can be shared with other locations and regions without having to recreate them.

Azure did something very similar with Azure shared Image Gallery, making it easier to manage, share, and globally distribute custom virtual images in Azure, providing a simple way to share your applications with others in your organization, within or across Azure Active Directory (AD) tenants and regions.

 

As expected from a best-in-class multi-cloud platform, VMware Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation) also leverages Azure shared Image Gallery functionality when it's time to offer Azure VM services across regions.

Let's see how it works:

Image mappings target operations system specification and images for cloud accounts/regions inside Automation, allowing the creation of agnostics templates that can be reused for several other services.

What people always struggles to is how to configure it.
If you try to find the image on a cloud account that is not the owner, I mean the region/subscription where the image was created, you will not be able to find it and will get an error message such as: "No matching images found"

 


That's because images are part of the cloud account inventory. Since the image "leaves" in another account/subscription the inventory collection would not be able to find it and make it available on the dropdown list.

It does not mean you cannot use it;
Simply type the image ID on the field and save it.


But, now it lies the question, which ID?
I'm glad you asked !! the Azure Image ID is a combination of subscription, resource group, gallery, image, etc.
One of the ways to get this ID is using the az command line:
az sig image-definition list --gallery-name "galery_goes_here" -g "ResourceGroup_goes_here" --query "[].{Name:name, Path:id}"


There will go, just grab the path information and paste it into the image mapping field.
It should look like this:


 
Now you can leverage VMware Aria Automation to deploy Azure VMs across all regions and accounts using the same golden image.



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