DSC

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are a great resource for deploying Azure infrastructure, including virtual machines, in a declarative manner. However, using an ARM template to deploy a VM will only get you as far as having a VM deployed and the operating system installed and running. The next step is to get any applications and supporting software installed on those machines. Of course you can RDP to machine and do this manually, but this breaks down quickly if you have lots of machines or need to regularly deploy VM’s.

Anyone using the Azure DSC Extension for ARM deployments with the “AutoUpgradeMinorVersion” property set to true will notice that the extension version has gone up to 2.9.1. No official announcement as yet on what is in it, but testing has shown that at a minimum this includes a fix for an issue with server 2016 TP4 OS’s where DSC deployments would fail with the error: ConvertTo-MOFInstance : System.ArgumentException error processing property 'Password' OF TYPE 'MSFT_Credential': Certificate 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA' cannot be used for encryption.