Automate Creating Lab Virtual Machines in Azure with PowerShell

As you may or may not know, I recently decommissioned my old Dell PowerEdge 1950 server that I used for a few Lab virtual machines. While experimenting with PowerShell on these Virtual Machines, I have found myself in the situation where it would be easier to delete the Virtual Machines and re-create them instead of troubleshooting something I fouled up in the Registry. After the 2nd time rebuilding the lab VMs using the Azure website, I decided to script the process.

The script below will take input from a CSV file and create a virtual machine in your Azure subscription for each row in the CSV file. My example creates 2 virtual machines but you can obviously add as many as you need.

For a production environment in Azure, I would suggest Snapshotting the Virtual Machines. There is a good write-up of the process here: http://www.coreazure.com/snapshot-vms-in-azure-resource-manager/. In my case, for a Lab, snapshots use more storage which costs more $$.