Azure PowerShell is a set of modules that provides required cmdlets to manage Microsoft Azure with PowerShell. You can use cmdlets to do pretty much everything you can do with GUI and much more.

As of now, Azure is managed using two management portals:

1. Azure Management Portal or Classic Azure Portal: This is located at https://manage.windowsazure.com. It was launched when azure was launched.

2. Azure Resource Manager Portal: This is based on new resource manager portal by Microsoft and still in preview mode. It is going to future of classic Azure portal.

So Azure PowerShell installation includes three Windows PowerShell modules:

1. Azure: Includes the traditional cmdlets for managing individual resources, such as storage accounts, websites, databases, virtual machines, and media services.

2. AzureResourceManager: Includes cmdlets for creating, managing, and deploying the Azure resources for a complex service as a logical unit. Use this module to create resource groups that support web portals, photo galleries, blogs, wikis and more.

3. AzureProfile: Includes cmdlets common to both modules, such as Add-AzureAccount, Get-AzureSubscription, and Switch-AzureMode.

Install Azure PowerShell

You can install Azure PowerShell using either 1) Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2) PowerShell Gallery.

1) Install using web platform installer

If its not already located on your computer, you can download and run it from here. This is a typical GUI based installer.

There is a known issue with PowerShell $env:PSModulePath that can occur when installing from WebPI. If your computer requires a restart due to system updates or other installations, it may cause updates $env:PSModulePath to not include the path where Azure PowerShell is installed. If this occurs, you may see a ‘cmdlet not recognized’ message when attempting to use Azure PowerShell cmdlets after the installation or upgrade. If this occurs, restarting the machine should fix the problem.

2) Install using PowerShell gallery

If you are running on PowerShell version 3.0 or later, you can install it directly from PowerShell gallery. To do this, open a PowerShell window in administrative mode, and run following two commands one-by-one:

#Install the Azure Resource Manager modules from the PowerShell Gallery
Install-Module AzureRM

# Install the Azure Service Management module from the PowerShell Gallery
Install-Module Azure

Once you are done with installation, if you run Get-Module cmdlet, it would show three modules as below:

Have a nice day ahead!