In these days, you are most likely looking for solutions
where you can leverage powershell to gain some level of automation no matter if
it’s on premises or in the cloud.
I have been writing about the common service management
API in the Cloud OS vision before, where Microsoft Azure and Azure Pack is
sharing the same exact management API.
In this blog post, we will have a look at the tenant
public API in Azure Pack and see how to make it available for your tenants and
also how do some basic tasks through powershell.
Azure Pack can either be installed with the express setup
(all portals, sites and API’s on the same machine) or distributed, where you
have dedicated virtual machines for each portal, site and components. By having
a look at the API’s only, you can see that we have the following:
Windows Azure Pack
and its service management API includes three separate components.
·
Windows Azure Pack: Admin API (Not publicly
accessible). The Admin API exposes functionality to complete administrative
tasks from the management portal for administrators or through the use of
Powershell cmdlets. (Blog
post: http://kristiannese.blogspot.no/2014/06/working-with-admin-api-in-windows-azure.html )
·
Windows Azure Pack: Tenant API (Not publicly
accessible). The Tenant API enables users, or tenants, to manage and configure
cloud services that are included in the plans that they subscribe to.
·
Windows Azure Pack: Tenant Public API (publicly
accessible). The Tenant Public API enables end users to manage and configure
cloud services that are included in the plans that they subscribe to. The Tenant
Public API is designed to serve all the requirements of end users that
subscribe to the various services that ha hosting service provider provides
Making the Tenant
Public API available and accessible for your tenants
Default, the Tenant Public API is installed on port 30006
– which means it is not very firewall friendly.
We have already made the tenant portal and the
authentication site available on port 443 (described by Flemming in this blog
post: http://flemmingriis.com/windows-azure-pack-publishing-using-sni/
), and now we need to configure the tenant public API as well.
1) Create
a DNS record for your tenant public API endpoint.
We will need to have a DNS registration for the API. In our
case, we have registered “api.systemcenter365.com” and are ready to go.
2) Log
on to your virtual machine running the tenant public API.
In our case, this is the same virtual machine that runs
the rest of the internet facing parts, like tenant site and tenant
authentication site. This means that we have already registered
cloud.systemcenter365.com and cloudauth.systemcenter365.com to this particular
server, and now also api.systemcenter365.com.
3) Change
the bindings on the tenant public API in IIS
Navigate to IIS and locate the tenant public API. Click bindings,
and change to port 443, register with your certificate and also type the
correct hostname that the tenants will be using when accessing this API.
4) Reconfigure
the tenant public API with Powershell
Next, we need to update the configuration for Azure Pack
using powershell (accessing the admin
API).
The following cmdlet will change the tenant public API to
use port 443 and host name “api.systemcenter365.com”.
Set-MgmtSvcFqdn –Namespace TenantPublicAPI –FQDN “api.systemcenter365.com”
–Connectionstring “Data Source=sqlwap;Initial
Catalog=Microsoft.MgmtSvc.Store;User Id=sa;Password=*” –Port 443
That’s it! You are done, and have now made the tenant
public API publicly accessible.
Before we proceed, we need to ensure that we have the
right tools in place for accessing the API as a tenant.
It might be quite obvious for some, but not everyone. To be
able to manage Azure Pack subscriptions through Powershell, we basically need
the powershell module for Microsoft Azure. That is right. We have a bunch of
cmdlets in the Azure module for powershell that is directly related to Azure
Pack.
You can read more about the Azure module and download it
by following this link: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/install-configure-powershell/
Or simply search for it if you have Web Platform
Installer in place on your machine.
Deploying a
virtual machine through the Tenant Public API
Again, if you are familiar with Microsoft Azure and the
powershell module, you have probably been hitting the “publishsettings” file a
couple of times.
Normally when logging into Azure or Azure Pack, you reach
for the portal, get redirected to some authentication site (can also be ADFS if
not using the default authentication site in Azure Pack) and then sent back to
the portal again which in our case is cloud.systemcenter365.com.
The same process will take place if you are trying to
access the “publishsettings”. Typing https://cloud.systemcenter365.com/publishsettings
in the internet explorer will first require you to logon and then you will have
access to your published settings. This will download a file for you that
contains your secure credentials and additional information about your
subscription for use in your WAP environment.
Once download, we can open the file to explore the
content and verify the changes we did when making the tenant public API
publicly accessible in the beginning of this blog post.
Picture api content
Next, we will head over to Powershell to start exporing
the capabilities.
1) Import
the publish settings file using Powershell
Import-WAPackPublishSettingsFile “C:\MVP.Publishsettings”
Make sure the cmdlet fits your environment and points to
the file you have downloaded.
2) Check
to see the active subscriptions for the tenant
Get-WAPackSubscription | select SubscriptionName, ServiceEndpoint
3) Deploy
a new virtual machine
To create a new virtual machine, we first need to have
some variables that stores information about the template we will use and the
virtual network we will connect to, and then proceed to create the virtual machine.
4) Going
back to the tenant portal, we can see that we are currently provisioning a new
virtual machine that we initiated through the tenant public API
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