Granular Configuration Import/Export with zconf

This chapter discusses the “zconf” command line utility, used to perform import and export on individual Virtual Traffic Manager configuration objects.

Introduction

If you are likely to provision a significant number of Virtual Traffic Managers on a regular basis, any way to minimize duplication of effort during the provisioning process is a way to decrease time-to-deployment costs. Quite often, users will have a standard set of policies or common pieces of configuration that they want to roll out to a large number of services. From time to time, you might want to make the same configuration change across a large enough number of Virtual Traffic Managers.

Users might have some kind of change control database to store policies or configuration files. Subversion (SVN) is an example of a tool that can be used to store and manage changes to not only source code, but configuration files as well. The Virtual Traffic Manager includes a tool called “zconf” that can be used to perform granular levels of configuration export and import and to store those [partial] configurations in a tarball. If desired, the tarball can be extracted and checked into one of these change control databases.