Learn about the future of policy compliance.
Azure Arc for servers helps you go beyond existing
group policy capabilities. Now you can use Azure Arc to
extend governance and control to any virtual machine--whether
it's running on premises, in Azure, or even multi-cloud
environments. Literally running anywhere.
Hi, I'm Jeff Woolsey and this is one in a series
of videos that shows you what's new in Windows Admin Center.
Windows Admin Center allows you to streamline
everyday tasks and connect to Azure
for hybrid scenarios. In this video, I will show you how
to enable Azure Arc from within Windows Admin Center
and get started with Azure Policy. You'll see how with broader
visibility and control, you can identify and address expiring
certificates, security baselines, and much more.
Let's get started.
Azure Arc really comprises three technologies we’re talking about
right today, which is running data services anywhere,
at-scale Kubernetes management, but also the ability to
organize and govern across environments. So quick question
for people in the room. How many use Group Policy--anybody?
Yeah, and all the hands go up. Of course.
Everybody uses group policy. Now Group Policy is great if you're in a
domain and you're using Windows, but what happens if
you're in the cloud or you're in multi cloud or using Linux,
or you're not domain-joined? Then what do you do?
"Then it gets really difficult, Jeff"… Yeah.
And Azure Arc is all about that. Azure Arc is about extending
governance and control to any infrastructure. Essentially
what you do is you need to enable Azure Arc and you can do it
from the Azure portal. That's one way to do it. But of course,
because we're here talking about hybrid capabilities in Admin Center,
you better believe we can do this in Admin Center as well.
So here, I've got a server. This is silver-node1 and in fact,
you can see right over here, I'm going to select the settings
and I'm going to enable, click on Azure Arc for servers.
It's just a new option here in Admin Center, brand new this week.
So I can choose the subscription. Give me a minute.
And I can create an existing resource group or
create a new one or use an existing one. If I want to use a
proxy server, I can configure that--but I'm just going to click
on Create--that's all I had to do.
And what's happening right now is we're deploying the agent.
The agent does not require a reboot and it's registering this
resource with Azure. So now I have set up this Azure--it's
installed the agent. It's registered with Azure. And now
it says Set up Azure Arc for servers--all taken care of.
And of course, now, if I want to head on over here and actually
see what this looks like in Azure, I can click on it--which
of course, takes me to the exact right location in Azure where
I can see a whole bunch of Azure resources.
All readily available right here. And again, they all
appear in the single--even though I'm running in Azure, this
resource, it's on-premises, is currently running on
Azure Stack HCI, appears right here. And so now that it's
doing this, I can do things like apply policy. So for
example, I can head on over and configure Guest Configuration Policy.
And in fact, I'm switching on over to Admin Center doing that.
And here you can see, I'm at Azure Policy, and
here I am for this node, silver-node1.
You can see how I am doing from a compliance standpoint.
If I actually want to drill into a specific policy,
I can do that and see what those look like. And again, I'm
applying these policies to physical servers,
virtual machines, running anywhere. This is actually running on premises
on Azure Stack HCI. It's not running in Azure. But it's now a
manageable resource. So think about things you could apply...
...apply policy for: certificates that are expiring, security baselines,
making sure that Defender ATP is enabled on
every one of your resources.
And so many more. We've actually included a whole bunch of these
already built right into Azure Policy. And if you want to
create those, you can actually create your own as well. So for
all those folks that raised their hand and talked about GP,
a little bit of career advice. I know you've probably spent the
last 10 to 20 years working on GP and it's an awesome thing,
because it's a critical tool in your arsenal. This is going to be the next one.
You need to make sure you're adding this to your tool belt.
This is going to be critical to your resume.
It's going to be critical to your business card and it's
going to make you highly marketable.
Because you are that person that can apply policy
and governance to any VM running anywhere.
Windows, Linux, AWS, Google, Azure, on-prem, all done here through Azure Policy.