Deploying the SQL RP with the latest Azure Stack PowerShell module

This is a quick post about how you can use the latest Azure Stack PowerShell module to deploy the SQL resource provider to Azure Stack (1908) , rather than having to use an older version that the RP documentation says you must do (which can be messy, having to remove / install various modules).

If you follow the pre-requisites, you require PowerShell for Azure Stack. Following the link in the pre-reqs gives you the instructions to install the latest version (1.7.2 at time of writing). I followed the instructions for version 1904 and later and that was great.

Further into the SQL RP document, there is a helper script to help you with the deployment. The script states that the modules required are for specific versions, which are outdated for 1908. This actually conflicts with the pre-requirement, as the link is to install version 1.7.2 of the AzureStack Module. I don’t particularly want o remove/install different version of Modules to my system as it is time consuming and unnecessary, IMO. Anyway, I decided to carry on as it may have been an oversight.

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Next, I had download version 1.1.33.0 of the SQL RP

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I ran the self-extracting exe file and from the extracted directory, I ran from and elevated PowerShell session the DeploySQLProvider.ps1 script

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Even though I had followed all the pre-reqs in the article, an exception was thrown as seen below:

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As you can see, it is complaining about the Azure Stack PowerShell module. I know that version 2.5.0 and ArmProfile 2019-03-01-hybrid is supported with Azure Stack 1908, so I took a look at the script to find out what was throwing this error.

I did a search for ‘Checking for Azure Stack Powershell Module …’ and it took me to the following :

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It looked like the Test-AzureStackPowershell function was the candidate. The function wasn’t defined within the script, so it must have come from some other module. I ran the following commands to get the information I needed:

get-command Test-AzureStackPowerShell

get-module Common | ft Path

You can see the output here; the source of the function was the key to find where it resided:

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Now I went and took a look at the Common.psm1 module.

I did a search for a distinct part of the error message that’s thrown - ‘Use ArmProfile 2018-03-01-hybrid’ and it took me to this:

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I could see in the elseif statement that it was looking for a minor version equal to 3. Given that I’m running 2.5.0, that was never going to work. So to try and resolve the error, I changed the ‘-eq’ to ‘-ge’, so that it would work for any minor version greater or equal to 3 and above.

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I removed the currently loaded Common module:

Remove-Module Common

Then I ran the DeploySQLProvider.ps1 script again:

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Bingo! Fixed it. As you can see, it evaluates version 2.5.0 as supported and carries on until the deployment completes successfully…

So it turns out a simple change in the Common module has made life a lot more straightforward.