VM Role in Windows Azure Pack adds greater flexibilities and self-service capabilities in IaaS offerings. VM Role is not just about providing virtual machines for tenant's workload, it takes IaaS services to another level by offering automated applications deployment in VM in a self-service manner.
VM Role packages are developed in JSON and provide resources or values, which are used to provision virtual machines and applications. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight format used for data interchanging.
JSON files for a VM Role along with metadata such as logos, resources, and more make a VM Role package.
A VM Role is primarily made up of two components/packages as follows:
Resource Definition package
Resource Extension package
Before diving into these packages, let's understand VM Role's working mechanism. In a traditional scenario without any self-service portal, VM creation requires some set of input as variables, such as hardware configuration (the number...