Building a CM Lab – Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) – Setting up CMG in the Console [16]

We’re four posts into our CMG Sub Series here, and we’re finally getting to the CMG setup, we’re going to go through the CMG Setup in the Console. Looking back, we needed to create our Certs (Note, if you’re not using an internal CA but a cert from a Cert Provider then you didn’t need to worry about that, but I’m not covering that setup, but merely an overview of how I set it up for our lab and hopefully it will be of use) and we’ll need our Azure Services already setup.

If you’re also following along in MS Docs, we’re up to this Point in the docs.

Lets go ahead and setup our CMG in the Console

From the Administration Node -> Cloud Services -> Cloud Management Gateway -> Right Click -> Create Cloud Management Gateway

Here we Sign in with our Azure Account that has the proper permissions, as we talked about previously.

Once you sign in, if you have more than one subscription choose the proper one, and the rest should auto populate.

Now we get to a fun part, lots of stuff to fill in. First you’ll need to add that Certificate we created in an earlier post.

It then prompts for the Password we placed on the certificate.

Once it imports, it creates this warning, since I created it with a wildcard since I wasn’t sure at the time what name I was going to use. Lets go ahead and finish filling it out

I’ve decided to go with recastdevcmg as the name. The name you pick will automatically be placed into the box after it. You’ll see that MS uses it’s own domain behind the scenes (cloudapp.net).

NOTE… YOU NEED TO SETUP A DNS ALIAS for your custom CMG Name [recastdevcmg.dev.recastsoftware.com] to the Microsoft backend name [recastdevcmg.cloudapp.net]. If you don’t have that in place, your clients and servers will not be able to communicate with the CMG in Azure.

alright, going back to that last image, I found it easiest to have the wizard create a new Resource Group in Azure. I made sure it was a unique name, and one pretty easy to know what it was when you’re in the Azure Portal. Also please note, you’re going to want to uncheck that box for “Verify Client Certificate Revocation”, unless you don’t.. but if you’re not sure, then you’ll want to uncheck it. [MS Docs] (as shown below).. sorry I didn’t do that when I first set it up and was grabbing the screen captures, and I found it caused some issues. But it wasn’t really practical, but thankfully some of these settings you can change after the fact… like that one. I also checked the box to all the CMG to function as a cloud DP, which is pretty cool, and I’ve been doing test with my client that doesn’t have a VPN connection back to the lab, and it’s great that I can install applications from the software center without being on the network. But I’m getting ahead of myself.. While you’re still on the screen in the wizard you’ll need to load your CA Cert, which I’ll show below too.

Make sure you uncheck that box in the wizard above, as I forgot originally. More info about this in the MS Docs if you want to understand what that box does.

This shows what you see when you click on the Certificates button, it will show any certs you already have in there, I didn’t have any, so I clicked add, then browsed to my root CA cert and added.

It will then pull the Cert in, and you can specify which Store, you’ll want to make sure it’s the Trusted Root Certificate Authorities store.

On the next page, I just left the defaults.

We now see our CMG service setup in the console, and it’s status is provisioning.

Going into Azure Portal, in the Resource Groups, I see the Resource Group that was created by the wizard.

Digging into the Resource Group I can see that is being deployed right now.

And here we are, my CMG is setup in that Group, and you can see the MS Provided URL

Ok, so now we have our CMG, in the next post(s) we’ll go over how to leverage this new CMG. We still have a few more things to setup in the Console before it’s useable.

So we’re getting close, so hang in there team!

Related Blog Posts:

‍Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) – Certs PreReq [13]

Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) – Azure Subscription [14]

Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) – Azure Services Connection[15]

Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) – Post CMG Config [17]

Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) – Client CMG Endpoints [18]