Azure VM Agent

Today we will be talking about the very important application or software which makes Azure VM awesome and let it function with all the functionality we all requires like VM Extension , Password rest etc.

The Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Agent (VM Agent) is a secure, lightweight process that manages virtual machine (VM) interaction with the Azure Fabric Controller.

The VM Agent has a primary role in enabling and executing Azure virtual machine extensions.

The Azure Virtual Machine Agent (VM Agent) provides useful features, such as local administrator password reset and script pushing. This article shows you how find out status and version of Agent.

Powershell way : 

$vms = Get-AzVM

foreach ($vm in $vms) {
    $agent = $vm | Select -ExpandProperty OSProfile | Select -ExpandProperty Windowsconfiguration | Select ProvisionVMAgent
    Write-Host $vm.Name $agent.ProvisionVMAgent
}

OSProfile                  :
  ComputerName             : myVM
  AdminUsername            : myUserName
  WindowsConfiguration     :
    ProvisionVMAgent       : True
    EnableAutomaticUpdates : True

OR

For single VM you can follow this –

 $vm = get-azvm -ResourceGroupName "Resourcegroupname" -Name "VMname"

 $vm.OSProfile.WindowsConfiguration


ProvisionVMAgent          : True
EnableAutomaticUpdates    : True
TimeZone                  : 
AdditionalUnattendContent : 
WinRM 



Manual Detection via Portal :

When logged in to a Windows VM, Task Manager can be used to examine running processes. 

To check for the Azure VM Agent, open Task Manager, click the Details tab, and look for a

process name WindowsAzureGuestAgent.exe. The presence of this process indicates that the VM agent is installed.

On portal follow : Poart > VM > Settings > Properties > Agent Status and Version

https://docs.microsoft.com/bs-latn-ba/azure/virtual-machines/extensions/agent-windows

if you have installed the agent manually after creating the image from disk or image then make sure you allow the extension operations -

$vm.OSProfile.AllowExtensionOperations = $true
$vm | Update-AzureRmVM



Supported agent versions
In order to provide the best possible experience, there are minimum versions of the agent. For more information, see this article.

Supported OSes

The Windows Guest agent runs on multiple OSes, however the extensions framework has a limit for the OSes that extensions. For more information, see this this article.