For those Azure Stack Operators that manage the Azure Stack Marketplace you know some of the pain points of keeping track when a Marketplace item is updated.  This is pretty much a monthly job for someone to verify that all the extensions and core images synced to your Azure Stack’s are up to date.  Well, I came across a PowerShell script written by John Savill that will help with managing the Azure Stack Marketplace items.  At least for the core images and extensions. For those that don’t know John Savill, he is someone you should meet at least once in your life.  Very smart guy and I am always amazed watching him do a presentation without PowerPoint and how he just has all that knowledge about the subject he is talking about in his head.  So when I saw his blog post about his Azure Stack Marketplace Management PowerShell script I jumped on it as fast as I could.  I wasn’t disappointment either. You can download the PowerShell script from John’s Github repository.  Once you have it downloaded there are two values you will need to edit within the script itself.  Make sure you update the $ArmEndPoint and $StackTenantID values.

Once that is done you just need to run the azurestackmarketplace.ps1 script.  You will be prompted for your Azure Stack admin credentials.   The script will run and verify that the extensions you have installed are the most current and if there is an updated one it will download the new version to your Marketplace. The same with the 5 core OS’s that John has identified in his script.  If everything is up to date it will just finish and you are done. Note:  You will need to make sure you have installed the most recent Azure Stack PowerShell on the machine you run this script from.

At the end of the script it will ask you if you want to delete any of the old images or extensions.  You can choose to have the script delete them or your can go to your Marketplace Management blade on your Azure Stack and manually remove the older versions. This script makes managing these core images and extensions easier.  There still are a lot more vendor items that would be nice to include.  That I will look into and maybe add to John’s script here in the future.  At least this is a great base to start with. Marketplace management is something that I hope they look at improving in the portal.  If you have had time managing marketplace items you will understand that it isn’t something to take lightly and isn’t something easily done. I highly recommend adding this script to your toolbox for Azure Stack.