What's Shared Image Gallery

by Jeroen Burgerhout 6 years ago 2 min read

Azure Shared Image Gallery, still in public preview, provides a solution to organize the management of custom VM images in Azure. Shared Image Gallery provides a simple way to share your applications with others in your organization and enables you to quickly deploy thousands of VMs concurrently from a custom image.

Image Management

Shared Image Gallery introduces three new resources that can help you with managing custom images. These three resources are:

Shared Image Gallery
Image Definition
Image Version

Using these three resources, it is possible to organize your custom images that can be used within an organization.

sharedimagegallery

Sharing across subscriptions

These three types of resources can be shared with another user, a service principal or an Active Directory group through RBAC. If an image is shared, a VM or VMSS can be created in any subscription within the same Active Directory tenant.

sharingacrosssubs

Replicating to different Azure regions

The Shared Image Gallery allow you to replicate your custom image versions across different Azure regions. This means that you can publish your custom image versions in one region and replicate the image to different regions as needed. Once the replication is complete, you can deploy a VM or a VMSS in that region.

Below you will find a table where you can create galleries and where you can replicate to, during the preview.

Create Gallery in	Replcate Version to
West Europe	South Central US
West Central US	East US
East US 2	East US 2
South Central US	West US
Southeast Asia	West US 2
	Central US
	North Central US
	Canada Central
	Canada East
	North Europe
	West Europe
	South India
	Southeast Asia

Enable Public Preview

To enable the public preview of Azure Shared Image Gallery, use the below Powershell code or Bash code:

Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName GalleryPreview -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Compute Register-AzureRmResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Compute

az feature register –namespace Microsoft.Compute –name GalleryPreview az provider register –name Microsoft.Compute

More info on how to create shared images and maintain them, see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-public-preview-of-shared-image-gallery/.

Jeroen Burgerhout