After looking around for some information about managing my azure app i found csmanage and powershell commandlets. What are the difference between these applications and which one to choose?
The basis of Windows Azure Services management is REST API and beauty of using REST API is that you can wrap REST in any programming language as longs as there is networking and security infrastructure available. Most of the tools you mentioned above are using REST API underneath and using Windows Azure Service Management API. CSMANAGE and PowerShell Cmdlets are using Windows Azure Service Management API to manager Windows Azure subscriptions. You can learn more about Service Management API here.
There is also another tool call WAPMMC (Windows Azure Platform Management Tool (MMC) which is also built upon Service Management API.
Besides it there are 3rd party tools which are built using Service management API i.e. Cerebrata Powershell cmdlets.
Comparing all of above, I would say Windows Azure Powershell Cmdlets is the most powerful tool among all of these and it has been updated with bug fixes and many more features added frequently. To use it in your machine you just need to download powershell cmdlets and Windows Azure SDK in your machine as these are required.
http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/
Recently I also found a Java based tool called Burp to use REST API directly from its shell to manage Windows Azure subscription. There is no need for .net framework or Azure SDK. You just need a machine with Java runtime and Burp. I have added a blog on this regard here.
I think it depends on what you're more comfortable with. I don't think the CSManage tool is being updated that much any longer (maybe at all - unsure). The PowerShell cmdlets get a lot of attention - both from Microsoft and partners like Cerebrata.
My vote - learn PowerShell and go with the PowerShell cmdlets for working with your Windows Azure apps. Small learning curve and well worth it.
Related
I need to develop powershell script for automating vm patches updating in azure. I know we can do it by using azure update management but is there any other way to do it? I'm new to it please help.
You could refer to this Virtual Machines - Update to update a virtual machine.
PATCH https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/{vmName}?api-version=2020-06-01
In addition, we could also do this in the UI and capture the request URL and request Body in the Network via F12, then convert it to power shell script.
As per this Microsoft Q&A platform question, you may use PSWindowsUpdate powershell module cmdlets.
And, if you are looking for a way to implement a way by removing dependency on Azure Automation and Azure Log Analytics then check Automatic VM guest patching (Preview).
Also, I would love to know the reason for trying to manually develop script for automating VM patches when the same is already available to us in the form of Update management solution (that is integrated with Azure Automation and Azure Log Analytics).
I have created a ML WebService on portal.azure.com. I wish to create multiple endpoints programmitically for this webservice using Powershell.
However all the cmdlets available (Add-AmlWebServiceEndpoint) involve using the Old or Classic WebServices.
Is there anyway to achieve this for New Azure ML WebServices
What version of PowerShell are you using, and have you imported the Azure-RM module? See here.
You can see updated documentation for all the cmdlets that can be used with ARM-based Azure Machine Learning web services here.
We are developing an application in which we need to integrate different cloud services. We need to connect to VmWare VCenter server and should do the provisioning. Is there any Rest API calls to execute the task?
Thanks.....
Since this question was asked and answered VMware has released a vCenter REST API for version 6.5:
The VMware vSphere Automation SDKs provide support for your client application infrastructure with services to perform management operations in your vSphere environment. The vSphere Automation SDK for REST also contains samples to demonstrate how to use the new APIs.
The version 6.5 SDK enables programmatic access to the following
services:
Session management
Tagging
Content Library
Virtual Machines
vCenter Server Appliance management
Read more:
vSphere Automation SDK for REST 6.5 Release Notes
http://creativeview.co.uk/VMware-vCenter-REST-API-Part-1/
Currently, the vSphere API is largely SOAP based.
The simplest way to consume our API is via one of the existing SDKs.
For example, you can use the Python SDK (https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi) to perform most vSphere functions via the Python library.
Alternatively, you can use a configuration management platform like Chef via the vSphere specific plugin. For Chef, there is a vSphere Knife: https://github.com/chef-partners/knife-vsphere
If you tell us more about the problem you are trying to solve and the tools you are using, we can give you a more detailed answer.
What are the differences between Azure PowerShell Commandlets and Command-Line Tools?
is there a difference in capabilities?
are new versions published at around the same time?
is one of them the 'preferred' way to manage Azure resources?
I am interested in managing web sites, VMs and cloud services from developer's machine and also from Ci server (TeamCity/MSBuild - starting / stopping VMs).
I've noticed that Command-Line Tools is just a small ~5MB download while PowerShell commandlets have several dependencies (~22MB) and June 2013 version still relies on Azure SDK 1.8 October 2012.
The PowerShell cmdlets work only in PowerShell (on Windows machines). They're great for automating several concurrent tasks (i.e. scripting out an entire environment), or carrying out single tasks.
The command-line tools are cross platform tools (work on Windows, Linux, etc.) These are written in node.js. They're not as good for scripting multiple actions, but are great for developers that prefer the command line to execute tasks (instead of going to the Azure management portal).
As far as I can tell, they are not on a synced release schedule. You can follow the progress of each via their github.com repositories (https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat and https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools).
It appears that Powershell is a wrapper for the node tools. If you get an error in PS it will reference a .js file.
To test this simply allow your authentication token to expire without a login. The error message in the .json file it sends you to indicates a failure in a Javascript file.
The release schedule for WIndows Azure PowerShell and the command line tools are both approximately once every 3 weeks. You can get the latest from the github repo at any time (as shown above).
David Aitken's blog post and another post I cannot find anymore talk about PowerShell cmdlets within a CloudDrive example that let you manipulate Azure storage blobs and queues. Where are these now? He refers (presumably based on Azure SDK 1.0) to a samples.zip file, but my SDK just contains a Windows Azure SDK Samples link. I cannot find CloudDrive there, although it is mentioned in this archive. Unfortunately the associated downloads omit CloudDrive. I feel this must be somewhere really obvious, but I am too stupid to find it.
Check http://www.cerebrata.com/. They have more comprehensive version of Azure Cmdlets. However, it is not free.
http://www.cerebrata.com/Products/AzureManagementCmdlets/Default.aspx
Current version of WASM works with Azure SDK 1.3 and you can download it here.
To install WASM with Azure SDK 1.4 you can use workaround in this blog
If you have access to Remote Desktop to any of the deployed instances to Azure, you can just use cmdlets that are installed there. This is actually much better option if you want to debug your PowerShell script works or confirm how they run in real Azure environment.
You can use Windows Azure PowerShell which is provided by Microsoft. There are many storage PowerShell cmdlet there.
The msdn page is here.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj152841.aspx
Download Link: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9811175&clcid=0x409