One of the technology evolution underway in the enterprise is the transition to hybrid resources. Most enterprise organizations are no longer running all resources on-premises. Instead, they run quite a few resources in public cloud environments, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service environments (SaaS). One of the exciting developments coming from cloud environments like Microsoft Azure is the ability to run “cloud” resources on-premises. With Azure Arc VM management, organizations can do just that.
Table of Contents
- What is Azure Arc?
- What is Azure Arc VM Management (Preview)?
- Azure Arc Resource Bridge
- Resource bridge requirements
- What is Azure Stack HCI?
- VM extensions on Azure Stack HCI Preview
- Azure Arc VM management FAQs
- What is Azure Arc?
- What is Azure Arc VM management?
- What is Azure Stack HCI?
- Wrapping up
What is Azure Arc?
Before we look at the specific Azure Arc VM management capabilities, what is Azure Arc in general? Azure Arc is a new solution from Microsoft that bridges the gap between on-premises environments and Microsoft Azure. Instead of IT departments having one set of tools for on-premises and another for the cloud, Azure Arc extends the Azure control plane to on-premises resources, allowing teams to use the same tools for both.
The Microsoft Azure control plane is known as Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Any interactions with Azure via the Azure portal, PowerShell, SDKs, or connecting to Azure APIs interact with the Azure Resource Manager. Azure Arc allows onboarding on-premises resources or even resources in other public cloud environments into Microsoft Azure and managing and configuring these resources as if they are native Microsoft Azure resources.
The advantage of Azure Arc is it allows organizations to have a single management and control plane with the same management tools and automation capabilities found with native Azure resources, no matter if these are on-premises or in another public cloud environment.
Azure Arc currently allows managing the following infrastructure:
- Servers
- Kubernetes clusters
- SQL Server
- VMware vSphere
- System Center VMM
- Azure Stack HCI
What is Azure Arc VM Management (Preview)?
With Azure Arc VM management, you can use the Azure portal to create and manage virtual machines running on-premises on top of Azure Stack HCI environments, VMware vSphere, and SCVMM. In addition, IT admins can delegate lifecycle operations to developers, application owners, DevOps teams, and others for self-service virtual machine provisioning, management, and other operations. Using the capabilities provided by Azure Arc, teams can use Azure management tools for self-service tasks. These tools include Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, and ARM templates.
Azure Arc Resource Bridge
Azure Arc VM management uses something called a resource bridge. As a note, the resource bridge was called the Arc Appliance in earlier documentation and self-service VMs. The resource bridge enables VM provisioning through the Azure portal within the Azure Stack HCI environment on-premises. The Azure Arc Resource Bridge is based on Kubernetes and is a self-contained, lightweight virtual machine allowing operations to be performed across Azure management tools. These include the Azure portal, Azure CLI, and Azure PowerShell.
Azure Arc interfaces with the Azure Resource Manager and creates the native entities in Azure for VM disks, images, interfaces, networks, and other resources.
Resource bridge requirements
There are many requirements and prerequisites for the Azure Arc VM management Preview. These include prerequisites involving resources, Microsoft Azure, and networking. In terms of resources, Microsoft notes you need a cluster-shared volume with at least 50 GB of space available. These resource requirements are needed for the Arc Resource Bridge VM. It also requires 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory.
If you are running the resource bridge in VMware vSphere, it is an OVA appliance that gets deployed in the vSphere environment that makes the connection back to Microsoft Azure. Azure requirements include an Azure subscription, the latest Azure Command-Line interface, and the required Azure permissions, such as the Contributor role for the resource group.
In terms of networking requirements, you will need an external virtual switch, DHCP IP addresses available for the Resource Bridge VM, Internet access, routable IP addresses, and an IP address for the cloud agent hosted inside the resource bridge. If outbound traffic filtering is in place, you will need to ensure the servers can get to the URLs documented by Microsoft here: Microsoft requirements for the resource bridge
What is Azure Stack HCI?
As a brief overview, what is Azure Stack HCI that is the heart of Azure Arc VM Management? Azure Stack HCI is an HCI solution that provides hyper-converged infrastructure in a managed, licensed, and extended package with Azure cloud services. In other words, you have the physical hardware and software on-premises, while the management tools exist in the Azure cloud.
You can’t run general Windows Services on Azure Stack HCI as it is purpose-built as a virtualization host. So, you can’t spin up a file share or other common Windows services on the host Azure Stack HCI operating system. The hardware is also specifically tuned and built out to support Azure Stack HCI. You can purchase these as integrated systems from a Microsoft partner or buy validated nodes verified to work with Azure Stack HCI.
VM extensions on Azure Stack HCI Preview
The Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere solution, like Azure Stack HCI, allows running VM extensions on your Azure Arc-enabled VMs on Azure Stack HCI. In addition, this component provides the capability of post-deployment configuration, software installation, and various management tasks for configuration management.
Using this feature means admins enabled Azure guest management on Arc-enabled virtual machines. The feature requires access to an Arc-enabled Azure Stack HCI virtual machine with guest management enabled. Also, a point to note, guest management is currently only supported for Windows VMs.
Azure Arc VM management FAQs
What is Azure Arc?
Azure Arc is a new solution from Microsoft, allowing organizations to extend the management and control plane of Microsoft Azure to their on-premises resources and resources existing in other public clouds. It enables using a single set of tools, policies, workflows, and other resources instead of having a separate set of tools between Azure and on-premises resources. Azure Arc uses the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to extend control and policies to on-premises resources.
What is Azure Arc VM management?
Azure Arc VM management allows using the Azure portal to create and manage virtual machines running on-premises on top of Azure Stack HCI environments, VMware vSphere, and SCVMM. In addition, IT admins can delegate lifecycle operations to developers, application owners, DevOps teams, and others for self-service virtual machine provisioning, management, and other operations.
What is Azure Stack HCI?
Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft’s next-generation HCI solution that runs on-premises on validated hardware and is managed from the Microsoft Azure cloud. With Azure Stack HCI, Microsoft extends additional benefits to organizations, allowing them to run native Azure solutions on-premises, like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Wrapping up
It is an exciting time in enterprise infrastructure as organizations can use the best of both worlds, on-premises infrastructure and cloud infrastructure, in a hybrid approach. Microsoft Arc is a great solution allowing businesses to extend the Azure control plane to their on-premises infrastructure in a way that enables companies to streamline their tooling and management capabilities, no matter where resources exist.
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