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.

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.