My Azure Public Endpoint switcher

I recently worked through an issue with the Persistent VM beta in Windows Azure around remotely managing my VMs (machines as I will generically call them).

Now, my scenario is that I have multiple machines in Azure behind a single Service (DNS name at cloudapp.net).  You can of course bring your own DNS name and simply mask this, you are not stuck with it.

In order to get a remote session to each one, only one can have the RDP or SSH port at any time for the Service. 

So the setup resembles this:

• brianEhApp.cloudapp.net:3389 -> VM1:3389
• brianEhApp.cloudapp.net:56789 -> VM2:3389
• brianEhApp.cloudapp.net:54321 -> VM3:3389

This is relatively straightforward.  However, I ran into a situation what I was not able to authenticate to the higher ‘ephemeral’ ports that Azure was automatically generating as the administrative endpoint for my +1 machines.

So, I could use the Portal to change one VM then back out to the other and so on.

However, this was taking quite a long time.  And I am impatient.

So, I turned over to the Azure PowerShell cmdlets and whipped out the following script.  It switches the public endpoints for me and launches my administrative RDP session straight away.  Considerably faster than messing with the Portal.

$myVm = Read-Host -Prompt "what is the VM name you want to access via RDP?"
$myService = Read-Host -Prompt "what is the Service name where the VM resides?"
"The assumption is that the endpoint name is RDP"

# Check all the endpoints of all the VMs and move off 3389 to set desired VM to 3389
$deploymentVms = @()
$deploymentVms = Get-AzureVM -ServiceName $myService 

# First all VMs in the Service need to be off 3389 or there will be an error setting the correct one
foreach ($vm in $deploymentVms){
    $vmEnds = @()
    $vmEnds = Get-AzureEndpoint -VM $vm
    Foreach ($end in $vmEnds){
        If ($end.Port -eq 3389 -and $vm.Name -notmatch $myVm){
            $pubPort = Get-Random -Minimum 49152 -Maximum 65500
            Set-AzureEndpoint -Protocol tcp -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort $pubPort -Name $end.Name -VM $vm | Update-AzureVM
        }
    }

}

# Now, set the desired VM Public endpoint to 3389
Get-AzureVM -ServiceName $myService -Name $myVm | Set-AzureEndpoint -Protocol tcp -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort 3389 -Name RDP | Update-AzureVM

Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -ServiceName $myService -Name $myVm -Launch