Share gallery resources across subscriptions and tenants with RBAC

As the Azure Compute Gallery, definition, and version are all resources, they can be shared using the built-in native Azure Roles-based Access Control (RBAC) roles. Using Azure RBAC roles you can share these resources to other users, service principals, and groups. You can even share access to individuals outside of the tenant they were created within. Once a user has access, they can use the gallery resources to deploy a VM or a Virtual Machine Scale Set. Here's the sharing matrix that helps understand what the user gets access to:

Shared with User	Azure Compute Gallery	Image Definition	Image version
Azure Compute Gallery	Yes	Yes	Yes
Image Definition	No	Yes	Yes

We recommend sharing at the Gallery level for the best experience. We don't recommend sharing individual image versions. For more information about Azure RBAC, see Assign Azure roles.

There are three main ways to share images in an Azure Compute Gallery, depending on who you want to share with:

Sharing with:	People	Groups	Service Principal	All users in a specific subscription (or) tenant	Publicly with all users in Azure
RBAC Sharing	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
RBAC + Direct shared gallery	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
RBAC + Community gallery	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes

You can also create an App registration to share images between tenants.

Note

Please note that Images can be used with read permissions on them to deploy virtual machines and disks.

When utilizing the direct shared gallery, images are distributed widely to all users in a subscription/tenant, while the community gallery distributes images publicly. It is recommended to exercise caution when sharing images that contain intellectual property to prevent widespread distribution.

Share using RBAC

When you share a gallery using RBAC, you need to provide the imageID to anyone creating a VM or scale set from the image. There is no way for the person deploying the VM or scale set to list the images that were shared to them using RBAC.

If you share gallery resources to someone outside of your Azure tenant, they will need your tenantID to log in and have Azure verify they have access to the resource before they can use it within their own tenant. You will need to provide them with your tenantID, there is no way for someone outside your organization to query for your tenantID.

Important

RBAC sharing can be used to share resources with users within the organization (or) users outside the organization (cross-tenant). Here are the instructions to consume an image shared with RBAC and create VM/VMSS:

RBAC - Shared within your organization

RBAC - Shared from another tenant

Portal

1. On the page for your gallery, in the menu on the left, select Access control (IAM).
2. Under Add a role assignment, select Add. The Add a role assignment pane will open.
3. Under Role, select Reader.
4. Under assign access to, leave the default of Microsoft Entra user, group, or service principal.
5. Under Select, type in the email address of the person that you would like to invite.
6. If the user is outside of your organization, you'll see the message This user will be sent an email that enables them to collaborate with Microsoft. Select the user with the email address and then click Save.

CLI

To get the object ID of your gallery, use az sig show.

az sig show \
   --resource-group myGalleryRG \
   --gallery-name myGallery \
   --query id

Use the object ID as a scope, along with an email address and az role assignment create to give a user access to the Azure Compute Gallery. Replace <email-address> and <gallery iD> with your own information.

az role assignment create \
   --role "Reader" \
   --assignee <email address> \
   --scope <gallery ID>

For more information about how to share resources using RBAC, see Manage access using RBAC and Azure CLI.

PowerShell

Use an email address and the Get-AzADUser cmdlet to get the object ID for the user, then use New-AzRoleAssignment to give them access to the gallery. Replace the example email, alinne_montes@contoso.com in this example, with your own information.

# Get the object ID for the user
$user = Get-AzADUser -StartsWith alinne_montes@contoso.com
# Grant access to the user for our gallery
New-AzRoleAssignment `
   -ObjectId $user.Id `
   -RoleDefinitionName Reader `
   -ResourceName $gallery.Name `
   -ResourceType Microsoft.Compute/galleries `
   -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName

Next steps

• Create an image definition and an image version.
• Create a VM from a generalized or specialized image in a gallery.