FAQs from Mastering the Marketplace: Developing your virtual machine offer

Developing your virtual machine offer is a webinar offered regularly through the Mastering the Marketplace series. This session reviews the required technical configurations to make Virtual Machine apps and how to publish virtual machines offers to the Azure marketplace.

 

Looking for additional guidance with Virtual Machines? An Azure technical expert will take you through:

• A brief overview of what a virtual Machine offer type is.
• How to publish a Virtual machine offer and integrate the solution from the Azure Portal tool to Partner center.
• How to setup Tenants.
• How to create different plans to best suit your customers’ needs
• How to use Cloud-init within the Azure Portal.

Attendees can also participate in a short Q&A following the session.

 

Below is a list of recently asked questions from this session.

 

Q1. Once I published the image to the gallery, does it make sense to keep the generalized VM around (if yes, then for what purpose?) or may I delete it?

A: You can delete the image after the offer is published live on the marketplace. At full publish, MS maintains a registry of your images, so you no longer have to hold on to it.

 

Q2. Does the standard Microsoft Marketplace agreement work both for transactable and non-transactable?

A: Yes it does. It simply is an option for your T&C if you don't have your own.

 

Q3. Last time we used the Direct Shared Gallery it was in Preview and sharing was severely limited (only a few tenants and subscriptions). What is the situation now?

A: As of August 2024 it still has these limitations. You can share it across subscriptions on the same tenant but not across tenants. If that doesn't work, you can use a vhd link to publish the VM offer.

 

Q4. What would you recommend in terms of maintenance of the image and how many resources (team size) they would need and how much time they would need to for turnaround.

It depends on the image being built out. But once its created and published, marketplace has the image stored, so they no longer need to keep the image after publishing. 

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Additional Resources:

• Register for the next webinar on Developing your virtual machine offer, August 20 at 9 am PT.
• Register for additional Mastering the Marketplace webinars here.