We begin here on the home page of the Microsoft Azure portal. You can
search for this up here. Just say Automanage. I've already done that, and
I have it right here Automanage ‑ Azure machine. It comes up with this
blade, Automanage ‑ Azure machine best practices. And if I want to enable
this arc‑enabled server,
I come right over here to where it says Enable on existing
machine. Click on it, and I have three different options,
Azure Best Practices ‑ Production,
Azure Best Practices ‑ Dev / Test, and I can actually create a
custom profile to tell it exactly of all the features that I
want it to do for this custom profile.
I'm going to take Azure Best Practices ‑ Production and come down here
to where it says Select machines and click on it.
I have two machines inside of here, an Azure VM, that was
installed to show the Windows Server Datacenter: Azure Edition.
It's right here. I'm going to select this,
click on Select, and then simply click down here where it says
Enable, and there we have it. I'm going to click on Refresh, and
we see the Status is In progress,
meaning that it is connecting to our local on‑premises machine,
setting this up so we can have this under this profile of Azure Best
Practices ‑ Production. And we can go to our server right here. And a
lot of these things you see on the left‑hand side are automatically
going to be managed.
Let's go back to Automanage right here. We're going to say Enable on
existing machine, and so we know what these profiles contain.
I'm going to come here to where it says View Azure Best
Practices profile. Click on it. You should be informed
that Arc servers don't do backup, don't do the security center,
don't do the anti‑malware, the guest configuration or the boot diagnostics.
However,
it does a lot of these, and I'm going to go through these one by
one. The Machines Insights Monitoring monitors for the
performance and health of your machines.
It can tell you the running processes,
the dependencies on other resources, and gives you an option to learn more if
you wanted to learn more about Automanage. Update Management,
we can check on this, and this keeps track of the updates for the machine.
So, through this interface, we can access the status of available updates and
let Microsoft Azure take care of these updates because, again,
it's under Automanage,
meaning that we don't have to come in here all the time to do what we need to
do to our server under our normal management processes.
Change Tracking and Inventory.
So if there were any changes to this, it's going to track them.
If there's any inventory within this virtual machine,
it's going to track that. And again,
we leave it up to Microsoft Azure to tell us what the best
practices are, making your life easier.
The Azure Automation Account,
we've put one in there called Gary Grudzinskas, and this is an
account that keeps track of all the different changes we have
there. The Log Analytics Workspace, this is a place that stores
the log data for our log analytics,
which is basically an Azure resource and a container where the data is
collected, aggregated, and has a boundary on it for administration.
I'm going to go ahead and click on OK.
So that is how you enable Automanage best practices within Microsoft
Azure for our Windows Server 2022 datacenter that we have on‑premises and connected through the Azure Arc.