Sample: Configure Proxy in Azure VM Images

This is a sample how to configure corporate proxy settings in an azure VM image. Packer and Ansible are used to automate the VM image creation.

Prerequisites

On your local machine or on your build agent, you need to install the following tools:

• Packer
• Ansible
• Azure CLI (az)

For a quick setup, you can use the Azure Shell. All tools are pre-installed there.

Packer Config

Packer requires access to an Azure Subscription to automate the creation of the VM image. There are multiple ways to achieve that. In this example, the configuration of an Azure AD Service Principal is provided via Packer variables. This is most often the case for an end-to-end automation.

You can either provide a env.json file like this:

{
    "client_id": "your_client_id",
    "client_secret": "your_client_secret",
    "subscription_id": "your_subscription_id",
    "tenant_id": "your_tenant_id"
}

... and pass the variables like this to Packer -var-file=./env.json. Alternatively, you can pass all variables individually without a var-file.

To modify the behavior of the Ansible Proxy configuration process, you can add a second var-file or insert the following config in your env.json:

{
    "proxy_protocol": "http",
    "proxy_host": "serverproxy.contoso.net",
    "proxy_port": "8080",
    "no_proxy": "169.254.169.254,168.63.129.16,localhost,127.0.0.1"
}

And finally, if you need to provision everything in a private VNet without public IP address, you have to add the following config:

{
    "vnet_name": "TBD",
    "vnet_subnet_name": "TBD",
    "vnet_rg_name": "TBD"
}

and call packer with the packer_private_vnet.json template (see section Run).

Variables

Besides passing the base config for Azure authentication, you can also modify the packer invocation with additional variables, see ./packer.json's variable section.

Run

Invoke packer and building the image:

packer build -var-file=./env.json packer.json

For private VNet:

packer build -var-file=./env.json packer_private_vnet.json

Please note, that the target resource group for the packer images needs to exist. With the default variable configuration in packer.json, you can create the resource group via Azure CLI:

az group create -l westeurope -n vm_base_images_rg