TNWiki Article Spotlight – Schedule PowerShell Scripts to Manage Azure Virtual Machines
Hello and welcome everybody to our TNWiki Article Spotlight on Tuesday.
From time to time there are features in Azure you know are there, but you normally don't care about them ... until you have a problem you haven't faced before. During the last months I had this experience with Azure Automation. The scenario was to run a Docker host for integration testing on an Azure Virtual Machines. Nothing new yet, but one of the requirements was to save some budget and only run this machine during business hours. It was time to visit TechNet. I knew I had seen some PowerShell scripts doing something similar in the TechNet Gallery, but how to schedule them? On a separate host? From a developer machine? Because we were already running on Azure I thought of Azure Automation, but had no experience with it so far. So, next up, doing some research on Azure Automation. Unfortunately for me the article I want to cover today didn't exist at that time. In case you have a similar scenario you should check out Schedule PowerShell Scripts to Manage Azure Virtual Machines from Chervine. He describes what Azure Automation is and how you can set up an account. After that Chervine shows some sample runbooks for Azure Virtual Machines.
If you think about setting up scripts to run on a schedule or to run several scripts together, you should check out Chervine's article as a starting point.