Azure PowerShell IaaS bulk add Endpoints

There are scenarios when your VMs on Azure cloud will need a lot of EndPoints. Of course you have to always be aware of the limits that come with each Azure service. But you also don’t want to add 20 endpoints (or 50) via the management portal. It will be too painful.

Luckily you can extremely easy add as many endpoints as you will using the following simple PowerShell script:

Add-AzureAccount
Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName "Your_Subscription_Name"
$vm = Get-AzureVM -ServiceName "CloudServiceName" -Name "VM_Name"
for ($i=6100; $i -le 6120; $i++)
{
    $EndpointName = "FtpEndpoint_"
    $EndpointName += $i
    Add-AzureEndpoint -Name $EndpointName -Protocol "tcp" -PublicPort $i -LocalPort $i -VM $vm
}
$vm | Update-AzureVM

You can also find the whole script as a Gist.

Of course, you can use this script, with combination of Non-Interactive OrgID Login Azure PowerShell to fully automate your process.

Azure PowerShell non-interactive login

An interesting topic and very important for automation scenarios is how to authenticate a PowerShell script by providing credentials non-interactively.

Luckily a recent version of Azure PowerShell (0.8.6) you can provide additional –credential parameter to the Add-AzureAccount command (hopefully documentation will be updated soon to reflect this additional parameter). This is very helpful and the key point to enable non-interactive PowerShell Automations with organizational accounts (non-interactive management with PowerShell has always been possible with a Management Certificate).

In order to provide proper credentials to the Add-AzureAccount we need to properly protect our password and store it in a file, that can later be used. For this we can use the following simple PowerShell commands:

read-host -assecurestring | convertfrom-securestring | out-file d:\tmp\securestring.txt

Next we have to use the previously saved password to construct the credentials needed for Add-AzureAccount:

# use the saved password 
$password = cat d:\tmp\securestring.txt | convertto-securestring 
# currently (August, the 13nd, 2014) only organizational accounts are supported (also with custom domain). 
# Microsoft Accounts (Live ID) are not supported 
$username = "user@tenant.onmicrosoft.com" # or user@yourdomain.com if 'yourdomain.com' is registered with AAD 
$mycred = new-object -typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -argumentlist $username,$password 
Add-AzureAccount -credential $mycred

The whole PowerShell can also be found under the following Gist.

Credits go to Jamie Thomson and fellow MVP Mike Wood from their contribution on StackOverflow.