[Autogenerated] Azure Arc enabled servers.
Azure Arc is a pretty big deal and I found it's misunderstood by many people.
So let's straighten it out right now.
Azure Arc is actually a multifaceted service that goes beyond just servers.
You can also use it with databases and kubernetes clusters,
but we're concerned for at 800 only with Azure Arc enabled servers and what
this does is it extends Azure Resource Manager governance,
the off Azure systems and buy off Azure I mean Windows server
machines that maybe another clouds like google cloud or amazon web
services or maybe in your local data centers,
these can be physical or virtual Windows server machines.
Now, of course, Linux is also in scope in the real world,
but we're not dealing with the Linux side of the equation for
as 800 in order to onboard an off cloud Windows server to
become an Azure arc enabled server,
you need to install what's called the connected machine agent now note that
this agent is separate from the log analytics agents.
So if you really want your off cloud Windows servers to be
as integrated with Azure as possible,
you'll want to make sure to install both the connected
machine agent to bring the machine into arc governance as
well as the log analytics agent,
which enables the machine to not only be monitored with
Azure log analytics and Azure monitor,
but you'll find that just about all of the Azure management solutions
including Azure automation and update management and run books and
those services also have a dependency on that log analytics agent as
well if you're thinking Okay, well what about my data center machines?
We want to be careful about the internet,
endpoints that they're connected to check the exercise files
because I give you a link of the ports,
protocols and endpoints that are required.
But it's not too bad.
Mainly the biggest concern is that your Azure arc enabled servers will send
heartbeat messages but notice that the interval isn't crazy,
it's every five minutes and we're going on a firewall friendly port and
protocol TCP 443 and your traffic is encrypted with TLS.
Okay fine.
So you can manage off cloud machines in Azure, what does that give you?
Well, it unlocks some of the core governance that's available.
And as your resource manager like Azure policy where you can put
what I call guardrails on your environment,
you can include vulnerability scanning recommendations,
alerts with Microsoft defender for cloud and Azure
sentinel we can run Azure automation,
run books or hosted scripts on those Azure arc enabled servers.
We can deliver virtual machine extensions to those machines
and just have Azure monitor monitoring.
Bottom line is you might be really impressed with the capabilities,
the governance capabilities of Azure Resource Manager,
wouldn't it be nice if we could use some of the
armed governance tools off cloud, that is the value proposition of Azure Arc now,
you'll find that Azure arc doesn't unlock all arm
capabilities That's going to be reserved for your Azure VMS but this is a pretty good start, I think you'd agree.