In our overview post about hybrid cloud solutions, we introduced Azure Stack HCI and briefly talked about the different solutions within Azure Arc – Azure Arc enabled servers, enabled for data, and enabled for Kubernetes. In this post we discuss further the key drivers of our customers to use Azure Arc enabled servers.  

Did you know that DexMach is the 4th enabled Microsoft Azure Stack partner worldwide? If you have any questions on hybrid cloud solutions, you are at the right place. We have a cloud first approach – not from on-premises to cloud, but from cloud to on-premises. We provide the tools and automation to extend to on-premises or multi-cloud environment. Feel free to reach out to us, schedule a call at the end of the article.  

Alternatively, for a high-level use case design custom-made to your organization, opt directly for our 3 days’ Azure Hybrid Cloud Solutions Workshop.

Learn More About Our Azure Hybrid Cloud Solutions Workshop

Single Plane of Control for All Your Environments with Azure Arc-enabled Servers 

By 2022, about 75% of enterprise customers that have workloads in the cloud will adopt a hybrid cloud or multicloud strategy (1).

Having your workloads spread across different environments, be it cloud and/or on-premises, brings new challenges forward. As each environment has a specific management plane, providing a consistent experience for managing your servers is not obvious. 

Switching between environments to keep track of which servers received all their updates or getting insights on the performance of your servers can take a lot of time. All of this is also environment specific, so knowing where to find what can be tricky and time consuming. Here’s where Azure Automanage for Azure Arc-enabled servers comes in play. 

With Azure Arc you can onboard any type of server, virtual machine or physical server, into the Azure portal. Once available in Azure you can leverage the power of Azure Automanage to manage all your servers with the Azure server management services. Azure Automanage will auto-onboard, auto-configure, monitor for drift, and remediate if drift is detected. 

DexMach embraced Azure Arc from the very beginning, and we still provide valuable feedback directly to the Microsoft product groups for various products. This puts us in a unique position to help your company to get the most out of the Azure platform and its capabilities. 

Hybrid Cloud Services for Azure Arc-enabled Servers 

On top of that, Azure Arc enabled servers come with a handful of handy additional services to make your life easier. The following services are available for Azure Arc-enabled servers (2): 

Service  Description 
Machines Insights Monitoring  Azure Monitor for machines monitors the performance and health of your virtual machines, including their running processes and dependencies on other resources. 
Azure Security Center  Azure Security Center is a unified infrastructure security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers, and provides advanced threat protection across your hybrid workloads in the cloud. Learn more. Automanage will configure the subscription where your VM resides to the free-tier offering of Azure Security Center. If your subscription is already onboarded to Azure Security Center, then Automanage will not reconfigure it. 
Update Management  You can use Update Management in Azure Automation to manage operating system updates for your machines. You can quickly assess the status of available updates on all agent machines and manage the process of installing required updates for servers. 
Change Tracking
& Inventory
 
Change Tracking and Inventory combines change tracking and inventory functions to allow you to track virtual machine and server infrastructure changes. The service supports change tracking across services, daemons software, registry, and files in your environment to help you diagnose unwanted changes and raise alerts. Inventory support allows you to query in-guest resources for visibility into installed applications and other configuration items. 
Azure Guest Configuration  Guest Configuration policy is used to monitor the configuration and report on the compliance of the machine. The Automanage service will install the Azure Linux baseline using the Guest Configuration extension. For Linux machines, the guest configuration service will install the baseline in audit-only mode. You will be able to see where your VM is out of compliance with the baseline, but noncompliance won’t be automatically remediated. 
Azure Automation Account  Azure Automation supports management throughout the lifecycle of your infrastructure and applications. 
Log Analytics Workspace  Azure Monitor stores log data in a Log Analytics workspace, which is an Azure resource and a container where data is collected, aggregated, and serves as an administrative boundary. 

Azure Automanage supports the following operating systems for Arc-enabled servers3: 

  • Windows Server 2012/R2 
  • Windows Server 2016 
  • Windows Server 2019 
  • CentOS 7.3+, 8 
  • RHEL 7.4+, 8 
  • Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 
  • SLES 12 (SP3-SP5 only) 

If you are in need of a helping hand, whether just to take the first steps or hold your hand along the entire journey, Dexmach is here! We were Microsoft partner of the year in 2020 and finalist in 2021, and earned numerous Microsoft Advanced Specializations. But besides the theory, we have quite some happy customers and years of field experience earned through those real-life projects. 

Want to know more? Have a chat with us!

Glenn Mattys

Glenn Mattys

Head of Customer Innovation

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Glenn Mattys

Burak Yalçin

Cloud Solution Sales

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Glenn Mattys

Filip De Byser

Cloud Managed Services

Plan a call with Filip