[SP2013] Recipe: one SP2013 development machine in Azure

Technical / May 22, 2014 / Jasper Siegmund / 0

When you are a developer who’s looking for an easy way to create a development machine, this is the post you want to read. Especially when you also have an MSDN subscription lying around somewhere. What we’re going to do is setup a ready to use developer box in Azure. This recipe will require approximately an hour of your time.

Ingredients:

• A valid Azure subscription. We’re going to create an A4 (x-large) virtual machine. When you turn it off and on again, that should fit into any MSDN subscription level.
• An MSDN subscription.
• Some scripts, download.
• The Azure Powershell environment, download.
• Your Azure publishing profile, download.

Recipe:

• Downloads all the bits and install the Azure Powershell package.
• Start the Windows Azure Powershell prompt.
• First, make sure Azure is connected to your account. You can do this by running Add-AzureAccount.
• Then, run Get-AzureSubscription to find the name of your subscription, you’ll need it in the next command.
• Navigate to the folder where you downloaded the scripts.
• Run the following command:
  .\CreateSharePointDeveloperMachine.ps1 -imageName "03f55de797f546a1b29d1b8d66be687a__Visual-Studio-2013-Premium-Update2-AzureSDK-2.3-WS2012" -azurePublishSettingsFile C:\users\repsaj\Downloads\my.publishsettings -subscriptionName "Windows Azure MSDN - Visual Studio Premium" -storageAccountName "repsaj" -vmName "repsajdev" -vmSize "ExtraLarge" -adminUserName "jasper" -adminUserPassword "Pass@word1" -localSPFarmAccountName "sp_farm" -localSPFarmAccountPassword "Pass@word1"

• Things to review:
  • The image name includes the type of Visual Studio instance (Premium in the example), you might want to change that according to your subscription.
  • The publish settings file; this is the one you downloaded as a prerequisite.
  • Your subscription name; as stated above.
  • You should change the passwords obviously.

That’s all! Run the command and it will spin up a brand new VM in Azure. That VM will have SharePoint and Visual Studio installed. The installation will be in vanilla state, so you can configure it the way you like. My advise: start with copying a spautoinstaller folder to the machine and using that to configure the SharePoint instance. That way you have a repeatable result for the next time you want to spin up a device with similar config.

For more information about the scripts, along with instructions how to setup a box with AD or other types of machines (like Web and SQL), check out this link: http://visualstudio2013msdngalleryimage.azurewebsites.net/.

Bon apetit!

#azure, #powershell, #SharePoint, in

Jasper Siegmund