Ubiquiti Unifi Controller VM managed by Azure Automation DSC

This repo contains ARM templates and supporting PowerShell-scripts to deploy a VM with Ubiquity's Unifi Controller-software via Chocolatey.

The templates includes:

• Keyvault
• Storage account
• Automation Account
  • With cChoco DSC module
  • DSC configuration and compile tasks
• VM with network interface and the following extensions:
  • antimalware
  • DSC
  • diskencryption

The powershell scripts include:

• A script to generate a VM password and Key Encryption Key (KEK) and publish them to a key vault
• A script to copy the DSC config to a storage account blob container
• A script to write ARM-output back to the DevOps release pipeline

Limitations

• The solution is currently dependent on a subnetResourceId being provided to it. This means you need to have or create a virtual network in your Azure environment before you can deploy this solution. Also the example now uses a static IP config in the 10.0.10.0/24 address space. This IP can and should be changed to reflect your own vnet configuration. You can set it to 'dynamic', however, I do not recommend this since Unifi AP's don't handle IP changes in their controller very well.
• The package is being installed in the Windows\syswow64\config\sytemprofile directory as this is the %userprofile% directory for the SYSTEM account. You might want to keep this in mind when using this specific solution in a production environment.
• Since this solution is designed with for multiple ARM deployment tasks a 'complete'-mode deployment is only supported for the first deployment in the chain.

Dependencies

• Requires an existing subnet's resource ID as input parameter
• cChoco DSC module
• Chocolatey packages:
  • Ubiquiti UniFI Controller
  • AutoHotkey (Portable)
  • Java Runtime (JRE)

Tested scenarios

• Deployment from a Azure DevOps release pipeline as described in Automating Desired State Configuration

Future work

• Automatically restore backups

Release notes

• 2020-03-24: Changed vmImageSku to 2019-Datacenter after encountering incompatibility with 2019-Datacenter-core. Adjusted the vmSize to Standard_B1ms to compensate for the bigger memory footprint. Added 2 task to DSC script to get the software in a running state after deployment.
• 2020-03-23: Added a reference yml-build file and fixed an issue where a vm password would be generated on a incremental deployment.
• 2020-03-22: Initial release.

How-to / design:

Automating Desired State Configuration