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How to Find Azure Windows VM Images for Terraform or Packer Deployments

When we need to deploy Windows virtual machines using Terraform or if we need to create a Packer image in Azure, we will need to find the image information of the operating system.

The information required to deploy a Windows virtual machine is:

• Publisher: The organization that created the image. Examples: MicrosoftWindowsServer, MicrosoftWindowsDesktop
• Offer: The name of a group of related images created by a publisher. Examples: WindowsServer, Windows-10
• SKU: An instance of an offer, such as a major release of a distribution. Examples: 2019-Datacenter, 19h2-pro-g2
• Version: The version number of an image SKU.

This story will help you to find Windows images. If you want to list Linux images check https://medium.com/@gmusumeci/how-to-find-azure-linux-vm-images-for-terraform-or-packer-deployments-24e8e0ac68a

1. Listing Image Publishers:

We open our Azure Cloud Shell (PowerShell) or Azure PowerShell CLI.

Login into Azure:

Connect-AzAccount

The process starts by defining our Azure region using a variable:

$location = "West Europe"