Hybrid VM Deployment Through System Center and Windows Azure Pack

Q: Are there any examples of System Center Orchestrator runbooks that create a virtual machine on-premises via System Center Virtual Machine Manager and in Microsoft Azure IaaS?

A: Several people have asked me this question recently. At conferences, I've frequently discussed how easy it would be to configure a runbook that creates a virtual machine on-premises and in Azure, depending on certain criteria, that would then email the requesting user a RDP file that would connect the user wherever the virtual machine was created. I finally sat down and created such a runbook. It's fairly basic, with no real logic picking the cloud or template—but that would be easy to add based on your requirements, by modifying the PowerShell code in the runbook's Get Clouds for user activity.

I created a 20-minute video that walks through the entire experience, in which I also offer the service to create the virtual machine via Windows Azure Pack integration through GridPro and enabled Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) for the tenant portal (which I explain in "Enable AD FS with Windows Azure Pack"). The full walkthrough, video links, and downloads are available in my blog post "New Demo integrating a hybrid VM deployment with Windows Azure Pack."