Lab 1 - Partner Center Setup for a Virtual Machine Offer
๐ Back to Virtual Machine labs
This lab is part of a series of labs for Mastering the Virtual Machine Offers workshop. You should finish this lab before moving on to the next labs in this course.
Prerequisites before starting this lab#
- Partner Center Account with enrollment in the commercial marketplace program
- Access to the Azure Portal on the same tenant as is on Partner Center (Same tenancy is required to ensure you can publish images out of Azure Compute Galleries, more on this in the later modules).
Create a new Virtual Machine Offer#
In this section you will be creating a brand new VM Offer from scratch. This will be used for publishing the offer once the rest of your labs are completed.
The following steps will create an offer on your Partner Center Portal.
- On the Homepage of Partner Center, look for Marketplace Offers and click that tile. If you have disabled Workspaces, then it will be visible as Commercial Marketplace.
- Click the + New Offer button and select Azure Virtual Machine from the dropdown.
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You will now have to enter a unique Offer ID and an Offer Alias. For the purpose of uniformity for this lab, we will set a unique string to identify resources, like so,
- Offer ID: vmworkshop-YOUR_UNIQUE_STRING
- Offer Alias: VM Workshop YOUR_UNIQUE_STRING
Replace the variable YOUR_UNIQUE_STRING with a name unique to your organization
Once the offer is created, navigate to the Offer Setup page by clicking on that tab on the left.
Offer Setup#
Offer Setup page will direct you with ways to change your offer alias as well as enable Test Drive. For the purpose of this lab, we will leave everything as is and only configure the Customer leads section.
Customer leads#
Here, you will attach your offer to an Azure Data Storage table which will act as a connected Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) for your offer.
Create the Azure Storage account#
This is the first time you're using the Azure portal for this class. It is recommended that you install all the resources you'll create in this class into the same Resource Group, just to keep things tidy within your Azure subscription.
- Open a new tab for the Azure portal and log in.
- Create a Resource Group named vmworkshop-YOUR_UNIQUE_STRING. Please note that this is the same unique string you added while creating the offer.
- In the vmworkshop-YOUR_UNIQUE_STRING Resource Group, create a standard Azure Storage account. This will be your CRM database, so name it vmworkshopsayouruniquestring. Note all characters are lower case for naming a storage account.
- Once the storage account is created, browse to the storage account's overview page.
- In the left-hand menu, find the Security + networking section.
- In that section, find and click on the Access keys link.
- At the top of the page, click the Show keys link, and you see the connection strings for the database.
- Copy a connection string to your copy/paste buffer.
Configure Customer Leads in Partner Center#
- Go back to the Partner Center tab in your browser.
- Select the Connect link.
- From the Lead destination dropdown, select Azure Table.
- Enter your Contact email and paste in your Storage account connection string.
- Click the Validate link to ensure your connection string is valid.
- Click Connect.
- Click Save draft at the bottom of the page.
โ ๏ธ For each page, you must click the Save draft at the bottom of the page to move on.
Properties#
Navigate to the Properties page by selecting the Properties tab on the left.
Categories#
You must select at least one category for your offer. Virtual machine offers always appear under the Compute category in Azure Marketplace. For this lab we will be selecting the below configurations.
- Click the + Categories link.
- In the left dropdown, select Compute.
- In the right dropdown, select Application Infrastructure.
Legal#
We will be using the Microsoft Standard Contract for this lab. You may choose differently when you are publishing to the prod environment.
- Scroll down to the Legal section.
- Select Use the Standard Contract for Microsoftโs commercial marketplace? checkbox
- Click Accept.
- Click the Save draft button.
Offer listing#
Navigate to the Offer listing page.
- In the the Offer listing section, for Search results summary enter VM Workshop summary.
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For Short Description and Description, here is some text you may choose to copy and paste into the text box.
Quis aute iure reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint obcaecat cupiditat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
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In the Privacy policy link, enter the public link to the privacy policy for your company if you know it. If not, follow this link to Microsoft's privacy policy and use that URL. >Please note that using Microsoft's privacy policy is only for the purpose of this lab and should not be used for your production offer.
- In the Customer Support links section, enter Azure support website information (Optional)
- In the Partner Support Contact section, enter your contact information.
- In the Engineering Contact section, enter your engineering contact information.
- In the Cloud Solution Provider Program Contact section, enter the appropriate contact information (Optional)
- For the Marketplace media section you'll upload 2 images, both of which are available here.
- For the 216X216 logo image, upload the PNG provided. This PNG is named "Contoso-Logo-216x216.png."
- For the 1280X720 screenshot image, upload the PNG provided. This PNG is named "Screenshots-1280x720.png."
- Add a screenshot image caption.
- Click the Save draft button and correct any errors that be shown before moving on.
Preview audience#
- In the Preview audience section, enter your Azure subscription Id.
- Enter a Description (Optional).
- Click Save draft.
Technical configuration#
Skip this section for this lab. You'll come back to it later.
Plan overview#
Skip this section for this lab. You'll come back to it later.
Resell through CSPs#
Finally navigate to the Resell through CSPs tab.
- Select "No partners in the CSP program."
- Click the Save draft button at the bottom of the screen.
Review and Publish#
In this short exercise, you will check your work by performing the first action of the publication process. You will submit your offer for review to see if it is ready to be published.
- Open your offer's overview page.
- In the upper right corner of the page, click the link for Review and publish.
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Looking to the right side of the page, notice that some sections have a green circle and at least one is gray. The gray sections are not yet complete, preventing you from taking the next step of publishing your offer.
The Plan overview section of the offer will not pass review. This is okay for now as we need to fill out the Plan overview tab and you can't do that until we have a VM image. All other sections should be green.
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Go back to all sections that appear with a gray circle and complete those sections with the guidance provided above.
- Ensure all sections pass except Plan overview, which will be addressed in the next lab.
Congratulations! You have now finished this lab.