You might have heard about Azure Arc, which was announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019 in Orlando. Azure Arc is a new hybrid cloud offering that extents Azure Resource Manager to on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments. Azure Arc enables deployment of Azure services anywhere and extends Azure management to any infrastructure. If you want to know more about Azure Arc, you can find more here. In this blog post, we are going to have a quick look at Azure Arc for servers and how you can add servers to Azure Arc. Azure Arc for servers extends Azure Resource Manager to allow you to manage machines that are outside of Azure, using Azure management tools like Azure Log Analytics and Azure Policy.

If you want to know more about how you can use Azure Arc for servers, you can check my video.

If you are a service provider, you will be happy to hear that Azure Arc also integrates into Azure Lighthouse. Sonia Cuff wrote a great blog post about how you can manage security for your customers using Azure Lighthouse and Azure Arc.

How to add a server to Azure Arc

To use Azure Arc for servers, there are a couple of prerequisites that you should be aware which you can find here. Since Azure Arc for servers is currently in public preview, you will need to register the required resource providers.

Azure PowerShell:

Login-AzAccount Set-AzContext -SubscriptionId [subscription you want to onboard] Register-AzResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.HybridCompute Register-AzResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.GuestConfiguration

Azure CLI

az account set --subscription "{Your Subscription Name}" az provider register --namespace 'Microsoft.HybridCompute' az provider register --namespace 'Microsoft.GuestConfiguration'

To onboard a server which can run Linux or Windows, physical or virtual, and can run on-premises or at another service provider, you open Azure Arc in the Azure Portal. There you can select manage servers.

Azure Arc Portal

Here you will see your existing servers which you have on-boarded.

Azure Arc Server in Portal

You can click on Add to add another server. You will be able to add a single server or get instructions to onboard servers at scale.

Add server to Azure Arc

Here you can go through a wizard that will help you to generate a script, which you can copy or download to run it on your server. You can select the subscription and resource group, as well as the region where you want to join your server.

You will also be able to configure a proxy server if your server is behind a proxy. Since this will use the Azure Resource Manager, you will also be able to use tags. After you are done with the wizard, you can download or copy the command to run that on your server.

Generate Script

After you have run that command on your on-premises server, your server will show up as an Azure resource in a couple of minutes.

If you are using Windows Admin Center on Windows Server to manage your servers or with Azure Stack HCI, you can also use it to add a server to Azure Arc.

Windows Admin Center and Azure Stack HCI

Go to the settings of the server and click on Azure Arc. Now you can sign in and select the specific subscription and resource group.

Both of these methods are interactive, which both need a user to sign in. If you want to onboard servers to Azure Arc at scale, you can automate this process by downloading the Azure Arc agent and running the scripts using a service principal. You can find a walkthrough on onboarding servers to Azure Arc at scale on Microsoft Docs.

This should give you a quick start to add servers to Azure Arc. If you have any questions or want to know more, let me know in the comments.