Creating Multiple Azure NICs Using Multiple Instances (ARM Template)

I have started playing around with ARM and Azure in general and wanted to get my feet wet with linked templates and multiple instances. My very gifted colleague Kristian Nese has already covered template linking just fine, but I have yet to find a simple example on how to use multiple instances (honestly, I didn't try that hard, I want to do it myself).

Anyways, I thought I would share what I have done so far. It is a good introduction to multiple instances in ARM templates, and also get to use a few of the template functions. I will not provide a full solution (strongly suggest you piece it together yourself for the learning experience), but rather snippets and explanations (to the best of my knowledge).

If you are new to ARM templates: go away. No, just kidding, but do come back when you have the basics covered. I attended this hands on lab recently and found the excercises was an excellent learning experience. The teacher suggested not to use Visual Studio as you miss out on learning some of the basics of ARM templates. Follow that advice and just use your prefered json-editor (Sublime Text 2).

We will jump right in. The following snippet creates multiple NICs in Azure based on a parameter namePrefixes which we use to prefix various resources.

"namePrefixes": {
      "type": "array",
      "defaultValue": [
        "dc",
        "sql",
        "scsm"
      ]
    }

The resource NICs are declared as follows

{
  "dependsOn": [
    "[concat('Microsoft.Resources/deployments/',  parameters('vnetName'))]",
    "[concat('Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses/', parameters('namePrefixes')[copyIndex()], '-', variables('pulicIPPostfix'))]"
  ],
  "name": "[concat(parameters('namePrefixes')[copyIndex()], '-', variables('nicPostfix'))]",
  "type": "Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces",
  "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
  "apiVersion": "2015-06-15",
  "copy": {
    "name": "nicCopy",
    "count": "[length(parameters('namePrefixes'))]"
  },
  "properties": {
    "ipConfigurations": [
      {
        "name": "[concat('ipconfig', copyIndex())]",
        "properties": {
          "privateIPAllocationMethod": "static",
          "privateIPAddress": "[concat(variables('addressPrefixSplit')[0], '.', variables('addressPrefixSplit')[1], '.', variables('addressPrefixSplit')[2], '.', add(copyIndex(), 4))]",
          "subnet": {
            "id": "[variables('subnetID')]"
          },
          "publicIPAddress": {
            "id": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses',concat(parameters('namePrefixes')[copyIndex()], '-', variables('pulicIPPostfix')))]"
          }
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

First we need to indicate that the nics depend on a virtual network. Here I am using Microsoft.Resources/deployments because the virtual network has been deployed using a linked template. We also depend on some public ip addresses that we have created using multiple instances also.
The naming scheme is to iterate the namePrefixes array and postfix the variable nicPostfix (mine has the value "nic").
Now in order to provide static IP addresses we use the variable addressPrefixSplit which is defined as

"addressPrefixSplit": "[split(parameters('addressPrefix'), '.')]"

We simply split the addressPrefix parameter on '.', ex. 10.0.0.0/16 which is also used to create the virtual network. The IP address is then the first 3 octets of the addressPrefix and the 4th octet is the value of copyIndex() + 4 which would give us the addresses: 10.0.0.4, 10.0.0.5, and 10.0.0.6.

The public IP Address is a reference to the resource ID of public IP addresses created using the same approach:

{
      "apiVersion": "2015-06-15",
      "type": "Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses",
      "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
      "name": "[concat(parameters('namePrefixes')[copyIndex()], '-', variables('pulicIPPostfix'))]",
      "copy": {
        "name": "pipCopy",
        "count": "[length(parameters('namePrefixes'))]"
      },
      "properties": {
        "publicIPAllocationMethod": "[variables('publicIPAllocationMethod')]"
      }
}

Now you are ready to deploy a billion trillion NICs with just a few lines of json (not counting the billion trillion lines of name prefixes :D)