Using AzCopy

The azcopy command is the recommended way to upload FMOS VHD files to Microsoft Azure. It supports uploading “sparse” files efficiently, making the process significantly faster. The command is distributed as a single executable that can be run directly.

You will need to review Getting Started with AzCopy in Microsoft Azure documentation for steps on how to install the azcopy command.

Once the azcopy command is installed, it will need authorization credentials. The command supports Azure Active Directory (OAuth username/password) credentials, as well as Shared Access Signature tokens. To use an Azure AD account, it must be assigned the Storage Blob Data Contributor role.

Which authorization mechanism you use is dependent upon how your organization has configured its access control policy. Consult your Azure adminstration team to determine the correct setup.

To upload the VHD, use the azcopy copy subcommand, specify the blob type (PageBlob) and provide it the source file and destination URL. The destination URL is of the form where storage_account_name is the name of the Azure Storage Account where the file will be uploaded, storage_container_name is the name of the storage container within the storage account in which the uploaded file will be stored and filename is the name of the VHD file that will be uploaded.

https://storage_account_name.blob.core.windows.net/storage_container_name/filename

The following example will upload the VHD for FMOS version 2023.1 to a storage account named myfmosimages, in a container named fmos:

azcopy copy \
    --blob-type=PageBlob \
    FMOS-2023.1.0.x86_64-cloud.vhd \
    https://myfmosimages.blob.core.windows.net/fmos/FMOS-2023.1.0.x86_64-cloud.vhd

When using a SAS token for authentication, append ?sv=token to the destination URLl, where token is the SAS token string.

When the upload completes, the next step is to Create the VMI from the uploaded VHD.