Tutorial: Create Windows VM images with Azure PowerShell

Applies to: ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets

Images can be used to bootstrap deployments and ensure consistency across multiple VMs. In this tutorial, you create your own specialized image of an Azure virtual machine using PowerShell and store it in an Azure Compute Gallery (formerly known as Shared Image Gallery). You learn how to:

The steps below detail how to take an existing VM and turn it into a re-usable custom image that you can use to create new VMs.

To complete the example in this tutorial, you must have an existing virtual machine. If needed, you can see the PowerShell quickstart to create a VM to use for this tutorial. When working through the tutorial, replace the resource names where needed.

an Azure Compute Gallery simplifies custom image sharing across your organization. Custom images are like marketplace images, but you create them yourself. Custom images can be used to bootstrap configurations such as preloading applications, application configurations, and other OS configurations.

The Azure Compute Gallery lets you share your custom VM images with others. Choose which images you want to share, which regions you want to make them available in, and who you want to share them with.

The Azure Compute Gallery feature has multiple resource types:

The Azure Cloud Shell is a free interactive shell that you can use to run the steps in this article. It has common Azure tools preinstalled and configured to use with your account.

To open the Cloud Shell, just select Try it from the upper right corner of a code block. You can also launch Cloud Shell in a separate browser tab by going to https://shell.azure.com/powershell. Select Copy to copy the blocks of code, paste it into the Cloud Shell, and press enter to run it.

You can see a list of VMs that are available in a resource group using Get-AzVM. Once you know the VM name and what resource group, you can use Get-AzVM again to get the VM object and store it in a variable to use later. This example gets a VM named sourceVM from the myResourceGroup resource group and assigns it to the variable $sourceVM.

$sourceVM = Get-AzVM `
   -Name sourceVM `
   -ResourceGroupName myResourceGroup

Create a resource group with the New-AzResourceGroup command.

An Azure resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed. In the following example, a resource group named myGalleryRG is created in the EastUS region:

$resourceGroup = New-AzResourceGroup `
   -Name 'myGalleryRG' `
   -Location 'EastUS'

A gallery is the primary resource used for enabling image sharing. Allowed characters for gallery name are uppercase or lowercase letters, digits, dots, and periods. The gallery name cannot contain dashes. Gallery names must be unique within your subscription.

Create a gallery using New-AzGallery. The following example creates a gallery named myGallery in the myGalleryRG resource group.

$gallery = New-AzGallery `
   -GalleryName 'myGallery' `
   -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName `
   -Location $resourceGroup.Location `
   -Description 'Azure Compute Gallery for my organization'	

Image definitions create a logical grouping for images. They are used to manage information about the image versions that are created within them. Image definition names can be made up of uppercase or lowercase letters, digits, dots, dashes and periods. For more information about the values you can specify for an image definition, see Image definitions.

Create the image definition using New-AzGalleryImageDefinition. In this example, the gallery image is named myGalleryImage and is created for a specialized image.

$galleryImage = New-AzGalleryImageDefinition `
   -GalleryName $gallery.Name `
   -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName `
   -Location $gallery.Location `
   -Name 'myImageDefinition' `
   -OsState specialized `
   -OsType Windows `
   -Publisher 'myPublisher' `
   -Offer 'myOffer' `
   -Sku 'mySKU'

Create an image version from a VM using New-AzGalleryImageVersion.

Allowed characters for image version are numbers and periods. Numbers must be within the range of a 32-bit integer. Format: MajorVersion.MinorVersion.Patch.

In this example, the image version is 1.0.0 and it's replicated to both East US and South Central US datacenters. When choosing target regions for replication, you need to include the source region as a target for replication.

To create an image version from the VM, use $vm.Id.ToString() for the -Source.

   $region1 = @{Name='South Central US';ReplicaCount=1}
   $region2 = @{Name='East US';ReplicaCount=2}
   $targetRegions = @($region1,$region2)

New-AzGalleryImageVersion `
   -GalleryImageDefinitionName $galleryImage.Name`
   -GalleryImageVersionName '1.0.0' `
   -GalleryName $gallery.Name `
   -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName `
   -Location $resourceGroup.Location `
   -TargetRegion $targetRegions  `
   -Source $sourceVM.Id.ToString() `
   -PublishingProfileEndOfLifeDate '2030-12-01'

It can take a while to replicate the image to all of the target regions.

Once you have a specialized image, you can create one or more new VMs. Using the New-AzVM cmdlet. To use the image, use Set-AzVMSourceImage and set the -Id to the image definition ID ($galleryImage.Id in this case) to always use the latest image version.

Replace resource names as needed in this example.

# Create some variables for the new VM.
$resourceGroup = "myResourceGroup"
$location = "South Central US"
$vmName = "mySpecializedVM"

# Create a resource group
New-AzResourceGroup -Name $resourceGroup -Location $location

# Create the network resources.
$subnetConfig = New-AzVirtualNetworkSubnetConfig -Name mySubnet -AddressPrefix 192.168.1.0/24
$vnet = New-AzVirtualNetwork -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location `
  -Name MYvNET -AddressPrefix 192.168.0.0/16 -Subnet $subnetConfig
$pip = New-AzPublicIpAddress -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location `
  -Name "mypublicdns$(Get-Random)" -AllocationMethod Static -IdleTimeoutInMinutes 4
$nsgRuleRDP = New-AzNetworkSecurityRuleConfig -Name myNetworkSecurityGroupRuleRDP  -Protocol Tcp `
  -Direction Inbound -Priority 1000 -SourceAddressPrefix * -SourcePortRange * -DestinationAddressPrefix * `
  -DestinationPortRange 3389 -Access Deny
$nsg = New-AzNetworkSecurityGroup -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location `
  -Name myNetworkSecurityGroup -SecurityRules $nsgRuleRDP
$nic = New-AzNetworkInterface -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location `
  -SubnetId $vnet.Subnets[0].Id -PublicIpAddressId $pip.Id -NetworkSecurityGroupId $nsg.Id

# Create a virtual machine configuration using $imageVersion.Id to specify the image version.
$vmConfig = New-AzVMConfig -VMName $vmName -VMSize Standard_D1_v2 | `
Set-AzVMSourceImage -Id $galleryImage.Id | `
Add-AzVMNetworkInterface -Id $nic.Id

# Create a virtual machine
New-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup -Location $location -VM $vmConfig

We recommend that you share access at the gallery level. Use an email address and the Get-AzADUser cmdlet to get the object ID for the user, then use New-AzRoleAssignment to give them access to the gallery. Replace the example email, alinne_montes@contoso.com in this example, with your own information.

# Get the object ID for the user
$user = Get-AzADUser -StartsWith alinne_montes@contoso.com
# Grant access to the user for our gallery
New-AzRoleAssignment `
   -ObjectId $user.Id `
   -RoleDefinitionName Reader `
   -ResourceName $gallery.Name `
   -ResourceType Microsoft.Compute/galleries `
   -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName

When no longer needed, you can use the Remove-AzResourceGroup cmdlet to remove the resource group, and all related resources:

# Delete the gallery 
Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name myGalleryRG

# Delete the VM
Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name myResoureceGroup

Azure also offers a service, built on Packer, Azure VM Image Builder. Simply describe your customizations in a template, and it will handle the image creation.

In this tutorial, you created a specialized VM image. You learned how to:

Advance to the next tutorial to learn about Virtual Machine Scale Sets.