Use runbooks to automate VM Clouds

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Applies To: Windows Azure Pack

You can use runbook automation to automate tasks associated with VM Clouds. For example, after a user provisions a virtual machine using the management portal for tenants, they might want to install some specific software or monitoring agent on that virtual machine. In such cases, you can use a runbook to automate the task of installing software on the provisioned virtual machine. But before you can start using runbooks, there are specific actions you must take; for example, to connect the VM Clouds service to the service endpoints, and to mark runbooks for use with VM Clouds. This topic outlines the several pieces of this process and points to more detailed resources for each step. Use this as a checklist to make sure you’ve done everything that is required.

Register Service Management Automation for VM Clouds

You must register the URL and port number of the endpoint for the Service Management Automation web service in VM Clouds. The web service runs the runbooks for VM Clouds. For details on how to do this, see Register Service Management Automation for Virtual Machine Clouds.

Create, import, or edit runbooks

Before you can use runbooks to automate VM Clouds, you must have some runbooks. For more information about sample runbooks that ship with Windows Azure Pack, see Service Management Automation sample runbooks. For information on how to import a runbook, see Import-Sma-Runbook. For information on how to create a runbook, see Authoring Automation Runbooks.

Mark runbooks

You must mark any runbooks that you want to be available in VM Clouds for automation by adding an “SPF” keyword to the runbook.

Establish trust

The Service Management Automation web service certificate must be trusted on the computer running Service Provider Foundation. For more details on how to do this, see Establish trust between Service Management Automation and Service Provider Foundation.

You can specify events in VM Clouds so that they will automatically start automated runbook actions. For more details on how to do this, see Using automation with Virtual Machine Clouds.