Today, many organizations operate really complex environments.
These environments can span multi‑clouds,
different data centers, different on‑prem resources,
and more, and each of these environments present their own challenges.
These challenges can be security related,
administrative related or even operationally related.
With Azure Arc,
you have the ability to manage your entire environment
together by projecting your existing non‑Azure or on‑premise
resources into Azure Resource Manager.
Let's take a look at how that is set up.
Within the Azure portal, I have navigated to Azure Arc,
and now I'm presented with the getting started page.
I will go ahead and add my infrastructure,
and I'm immediately presented with a variety of different types of
infrastructure that I can onboard onto Azure.
In my case, I'm going to focus on my member server,
so I will go ahead and select Servers,
and then I will generate the script which would be for multiple servers.
Next I'm presented with my Prerequisites.
These prerequisites need to be adhered to if you
would like to connect to Azure Arc.
The great thing about these prerequisites is that they are not that extensive.
All you need is port 443 outbound, a local administrative account,
and connectivity to Azure.
So I'll go ahead and click on Next,
and now I need to provide my subscription details.
So I'm going to put my machines in my Wiredbraincoffee resource group,
the region that I will use is Europe, and the operating system that I
am onboarding is Windows. I also have the ability to onboard Linux
machines. From a connectivity point of view,
I will be using a public endpoint. Once I click on Next,
I now can configure different tags, but in my case I'm going to leave
these unconfigured. And now I have my download script. So I'm going to go
ahead and copy this script, and I'll jump to my Windows Server 2022 member
server, where I will run the script.
Alright,
so now I'm on my member server, and I have opened up an
administrative PowerShell window. Within this window,
I'm going to go ahead and paste the script that we have just generated,
and what the script does is it actually goes and downloads the Azure
Arc agent and installs it on the machine. In a minute or so, it will
present me with a one‑time activation code that I would need to input
into a specific website.
Right, so now I have my one‑time code. Let's go ahead and input this
into the web page. And once I have inputted the code,
my machine is now connected to Azure Arc, so let's jump back to
the Azure portal and take a look. All right,
so now I'm back on the Azure portal within Azure Arc, and on
the left‑hand side under Infrastructure,
I will select Servers. Within Servers,
I can now see my member server. This is really cool,
because I can interact with this member server as if it
was an Azure resource. For example,
I could make use of the security functionality of Microsoft Defender for
Cloud. I could also configure different types of policies related to this
server, and I can also go one step further and install additional
extensions that would work with the server,
for example, the Log Analytics extension,
which will allow me to collect data from my member server.
So this is one way that we can onboard our servers into Azure Arc.
Another way is using the Windows Admin Center. So I'll switch to my Windows
Admin Center, and this time I'm going to go ahead and select my domain
controller. Within my domain controller, on the left‑hand side,
you'll notice that we have an Azure hybrid center extension.
This Azure hybrid center allows me to set up Azure Arc and utilize some
of the additional Azure services. So for now I'm going to go ahead and
click on Set up for Azure Arc. It'll give me the similar output to what
we've seen from the Azure portal, and as this runs, it'll go ahead and
execute a script similar to what we've seen previously on the domain
controller.
So as the process completes, when I click on Installed
Services, I will now see that Azure Arc is installed.
Switching back to my Azure portal,
I now have my domain controller loaded into Azure Arc. So here we
can see how easy it is to leverage Azure Arc to extend our Azure capabilities to our on‑premise environment.