For those familiar with the JsonAdDomain extension, it provides an easy way to join VMs to your domain. However, one aspect that customers have been less crazy about is that the domain password must be shared in the protected settings (where it is at least encrypted) and, more importantly, the functionality of the extension doesn't work well with s...

One great advantage of VM Applications is the ability to specify how many replicas you want for each VM Application version. While documentation exists on how to specify replicas, we don't really provide advice on determining how many replicas to use. The goal of this post is to rectify that gap. First, the basics. When you specify a replica cou...

As most of you may know from the current Managed RunCommand documentation there are multiple ways your script may be specified. However, what if your script uses various artifacts that also must be downloaded to the machine? Well, in the past it was necessary to call RunCommand are use some other technique to get those files on the...

Perhaps one of the largest differences between "Action RunCommand" (internally called RunCommand V1) and "Managed RunCommand" (internally called RunCommand V2) is that Managed RunCommands are ARM resources themselves. That means you can use them in ARM templates. Recently, I needed to issue a RunCommand in an ARM template, so I looked around for...

One of the lesser known differences between RunCommand and CustomScriptExtension is the fact that we do promise to not re-run your script in RunCommand, but no such promise exists for CustomScript. This is mentioned in the documentation, which isn't often fully understood. However, more than once I've been asked: when does CSE actually re-...

In both VmApplications and RunCommand, we support a property called "treatFailureAsDeploymentFailure". Note that for Managed RunCommand it may not be visible yet in Powershell or CLI, but it is available via ARM. Note that this flag is only available for managed RunCommand. It is not available for action RunCommand. For those unaware, managed RunCo...

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" and d...

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 Limi...

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, let's...

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 this ...