Using Oracle Virtualbox VHD file to deploy an Azure VM Role.

Question

Hello.

First of all. I am totally new to Windows Azure, but as I managed to do something, I thought that my experience could be useful to other people.

Oracle Virtualbox is a simple, fast and reliable virtualization environment that many people know and use daily. Is nothing compareable with Hyper-V, but if you need to create an Azure VM Role, and you don't have the hardware needed for a decent Hyper-V environment, you can create a Windows 2008 or 2008 R2 Virtual Machine in Virtualbox, using a home host system, like Windows 7 or Vista, and then deploy it to Windows Azure.

Will this work ? Well the answer is yes. At least it worked for me

When creating the VM in Virtualbox, just create a standard VM for Windows 2008 64 bit. Please note that your computer must be 64bit capable, otherwise you will be unable to do so. Also, during deployment I noticed that the default Administrator user is removed, and a user is created according to project settings. I believe this is a process taking place due to the sysprep.

After preparing your VM with all the things you need, you will need to install the Windows Azure Integration component, turn off automatic updates, and make a sysprep of the machine before deployment, just like you would do using a Hyper-V VHD.

I found the following articles very helpful for preparing the VM, addressing issues and deploying it.

Lessons learned while uploading a VHD to Windows Azure

Exercise 1: Creating and Deploying a Virtual Machine Role in Windows Azure

Marco.

Answer 1

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your experience!

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Answer 2

I want to do the same thing only I want to use the "2010 Information Worker Demo VM" from

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27417

I downloaded and created the vhd but I can not start it in 'VirtualBox',

thus I can not install Azure Integration components, turn off automatic updates, and make a sysprep of the machine.

So I tried to upload the vhd as a disk(not an image) but I get "The .vhd is not a valid blob" message...

Answer 3

I want to do the same thing only I want to use the "2010 Information Worker Demo VM" from

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27417

I downloaded and created the vhd but I can not start it in 'VirtualBox',

thus I can not install Azure Integration components, turn off automatic updates, and make a sysprep of the machine.

So I tried to upload the vhd as a disk(not an image) but I get "The .vhd is not a valid blob" message...

You've probably found Rolly Perreaux's excellent blog series on this topic of getting the IW demo VMs running in VirtualBox (I had written up a step-by-step PowerPoint deck on how to do this before discovering his blog posts :-).  From what I can tell, Rolly didn't fully describe how to access the "contoso.com" sites running within the SharePoint server VM from the host Windows environment, and this ability was important to my application.  I recorded a video walking through the above slide deck that you might also find useful...

As for getting this VM running on Azure, I believe you may run into more trouble than the exercise is worth...  For one thing, the Active Directory configuration in VM "A" won't survive the sysprep process that Azure (used to?) require before you try to upload this 44GB beast...  I haven't tried this myself since MSFT added persistent storage to the VM role.

Also, Microsoft discourages connecting the IW demo VMs to the Internet.