Joseph Calev

Principal Software Engineer, Azure Core Compute

Software Engineer Lead at Microsoft. Focusing on enabling customer scenarios for VM extensions and applications.

Post by this author

Working with VM Application Names

July 5th, 2023
I admit that VM Application names can be a bit tricky, or at least non-intuitive. The basic issue is this, you have some binary - let's call it MyApp.exe - and you want to install it on your VM. Therefore, you create a blob with the name MyBlob and set your install script to the following: You then name your VM Application "MyVmApp" ...

Working with unmanaged storage account quotas in VM Applications

June 19th, 2023
While working with VM Applications, it's possible to receive the following error. Operation could not be completed as it results in exceeding approved UnmanagedStorageAccountCount quota. Additional details - Deployment Model: Resource Manager, Location: northeurope, Current Limit: 64, Current Usage: 64, Additional Required: 1, (Minimum) New...

How to determine if your Runcommand script failed

June 16th, 2023
Today, we're going to cover what can be a maddening issue in just determining whether your script failed. Let's start with a very simple operation. Open a Powershell window and run the following: This shouldn't be rocket science here. It's very clear that "this is an error" is, in fact, an error. So, with this universal fact determined, ...

Long running RunCommands

March 10th, 2023
Recently, there's been a bit of confusion involving long running RunCommands. For reference, the default wait time for RunCommand has been 90 minutes - the same as all other extensions. But what if you have a script that takes longer? Well, we've added a timeoutInSeconds parameter just for that purpose! The only slight problem is ...

RunCommand vs Custom Script Extension vs VM Applications

February 17th, 2023
I'm sure that many of you would swear that Microsoft loves to confuse you. Currently, there are not three but four ways to run code on your machine. Now, I know what you're saying. "I just want to run this thing on my machine! Which do I choose?" Well, here I hope to clear that up. First, all of the above work on both ...

Managing VM Applications with Azure Policies

February 10th, 2023
For those unacquainted with the feature, VM Applications allow you to manage applications across virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets. What exactly is an "application"? In truth, it's whatever you want. Typically, it's something that runs for a long period of time on the box, such as a service. However, the definition is really up ...