The other day I was having a look around the Azure VM blade and came across an option called Run Command. I have never seen this option before so of course
Information
To be able to do this you will need to have the Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/runCommand/action permission. This, with the Contributor and higher RBAC roles. You can also assign it with custom RBAC roles.
Lets use the Run Command
Inside the Azure Portal go to a VM you would like to run a PowerShell script or Command on. If you scroll down you will find Run Command under Operations.
Here you will see a list of options. To test that everything works for you, lets start with a simple one. IPConfig. Click IPConfig. A blade will pop up. You can expand the Script section to see what will run. When your happy click Run.
The script will start to execute. You should see a blue banner appear at the top of the blade. You will also see a black Output box appear at the bottom of the blade. Once the script has finished executing you will see some output like in the below image.
You may have to scroll to see all of the output.
Running custom Scripts
If you pick the RunPowerShellScript option you will be able to run your own custom scripts. There are some things to remember when you are running custom scripts and they are:
- You can only run one script at a time
- User input is not supported
- The output is currently limited to the last 4096 bytes
- It will take at least 20 seconds for your script to run
- If your script runs longer than 90 minutes it will timeout
- Once started, you can not stop it from running
- All Run Commands run as System
- Outbound connectivity from the VM is required to return the results of the script
Now you are aware of the restrictions let try running a small custom script. In the RunPowerShellScript blade enter a PowerShell command. You can use Get-Process if you would like to test.
A little bit extra!
You can also run a script from your local machine on an Azure VM. One you have logged in to you Azure Subscription you can use the following PowerShell Command.
| Invoke-AzureRmVMRunCommand -ResourceGroupName '<myResourceGroup>' -Name '<myVMName>' -CommandId 'RunPowerShellScript' -ScriptPath '<pathToScript>' -Parameter @{"arg1" = "var1";"arg2" = "var2"} |
I hope you found this helpful. If you have any questions please reach out in the usual ways.
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