One of the great aspects of Microsoft Azure Stack is the new Azure Resource Manager. It provides the ability to create templates for simple VMs to complex multi-VM applications running within your (local) Azure Stack environment, in a Service Provider environment, who is using Azure Resource Manager/Azure Stack, or in a Microsoft Azure location. There is a large community offering sample deployment templates for use with Azure Resource Manager. This chapter provides an overview of Azure Resource Manager templates and authoring templates to provision virtual machines. In addition we will look at offering virtual machines using the Azure Stack Marketplace.

The main topics are as follows:

• How to prepare new or existing VM templates
• How to deploy VMs using Marketplace
• How to build up the parts of an Azure Resource Manager template to create an IaaS (VM) service