Azure MCS Master Image and Snapshot for Machine Catalogs

[Michael Lindblom]

Hello, we have been fumbling around with trying to get a capture or snapshot of a master image in Azure to be able to build systems off of with no luck. I can't seem to find to much documentation on this process but it is definitely different then how we currently do these steps on-prem. Does anyone know of any documentation for this or can they share the steps they use to prep a master image to be pushed out from Citrix Cloud to Azure. Currently I and doing a capture of a VM, but when we go into Citrix Cloud Studio to select the master image, we do not see the VM Image we created in Azure. Any assistance or clarification of this process is appreciated. Thanks

[James Kindon]

Citrix doesn't use standard azure "images" for MCS deployments. It uses either:

• An Azure Snapshot
• An Azure Managed Disk (which it snapshots anyway)
• An azure VHD stored in a storage account (though this is old and going away)
• An image stored in a compute gallery (SIG) but this can't be a generalized image (can't have been sysprep'd)

I typically suggest customers:

• Build their image as per usual standards, manual or automated
• Seal that image with BIS-F ready for provisioning. Shut it down
• Take a snapshot of the OS disk in Azure
• Create or Update a catalog based on that snapshot
• Choose your poison as far as Ephemeral Disks/SIG integration goes etc 
• Choose a machine profile (This is a VM spec) or an ARM template spec that matches what you want each VM to look like
• Away you go

There are some advanced considerations/options if you are doing multi-region deployments with complexity, but that should get you going