it's been often said that necessity is the mother of invention and managing all
the different platforms and environments that we have today is pretty hard but
imagine just for a moment that it was easier imagine that in your not so
distant future you could project on-prem resources into the cloud along with all
of the other cloud platforms that you use like AWS and Google or Alibaba
this would enable you to leverage Azure's awesome management capabilities
and services so that you could have a single plane of glass and make your work
just a little bit easier that's sound pretty useful well we're gonna show you
how you can do it today with Azure Arc
I'm Dean Cefola and this is the Azure Academy the hybrid cloud is something
Microsoft has been invested in for a long time one of the Holy Grails of that
hybrid setup is the ability to manage everything to make all of your devices
seem like first-class citizens in the cloud is what Azure Ark is all about
let's take a quick second and learn a little bit about Azure Ark by going to
Azure.com/Hybrid in our web browser so right off the bat in case you
were not aware as of today's date is in public preview so all of these services
that we want in the end state are not quite here but we will be turning them
on as we go down the road today we can see that there are several companies
that are utilizing Azure arcs capabilities already and those happen in
three key areas at present servers data and kubernetes clusters and we are
planning for a series on kubernetes so if you are interested in that go ahead
and hit the subscribe button so you don't miss that but these three sets of
services also exist in three potential areas and that would be across multi
cloud like Google AWS etc on-premise and also at the edge so this deals with IOT
type solutions and Azure stack based solutions so Azure Ark will provide a
great breadth of services that we can leverage across all of these different
platforms so that we don't have to change the way that we want to work we
can just reduce the complexity of how we manage so with that I'm going to close
this page and we're gonna look at the documentation again because this is in
preview the azure arc docs are not directly linked from the regular Azure
Doc's page so I will have this link in the description below but basically what
we're going to do is take any Windows or Linux server we're going to add an agent
onto that box the box will show up in Azure and then we can do stuff to it so
with that we do have certain clients that are supported under this preview
and we have Windows Server 2012 r2 or newer and Ubuntu 16
18.04 so be aware of that as you were running through this and again this is
preview so when we go full general availability I would expect that we
would have support for more operating systems and the requirements that I was
mentioning around management from your network side are all listed here in the
docs as well and just be sure that you can hit all of these different URLs from
wherever your stuff is located if you are behind a proxy than we do also
support some proxy configurations so today we're going to walk through this
pretty easily and we're going to run some PowerShell here so that we can
register our providers install our agents and then our VMs will show up in
the portal and then we can start managing them so let's get into it and
here I have my powershell open and i first i'm going to check whether or not
i am registered with these two providers Microsoft hybrid compute and Microsoft
guest configuration and in just the second or two that will come back and I
am registered already with guest configurations but not hybrid compute so
I need to run a command to register that and we'll just run that command from the
documentation and we are in the state of registering I'll have to check on that
in a moment or two just so we know that we can start this process and that only
took about five seconds to get registered so now we're good to go to
start using Azure Ark and we're going to do that by downloading the agent and we
actually get to the download from the azure portal so let's go over there so
here in the adjure portal I've already got as your arc at the top here but if
you do not you can just type it up in the search bar and that'll get you there
or you can find it from the all services menu as well and inside azure arc we
give you this overview so you know what's basically going on all of your
servers would be managed from this first section uber Nettie's from the second
and data services like sequel will be managed from this third and you do have
to sign up for these previews individually again once this goes GA
this will all be enabled by default so click on manage servers and I will hit
create machine as your arc and now we have two ways to do this so if you have
a lot of machines and you can do this at scale if we look at those instructions
here is to create a service principle and we do have the code here for how you
go about doing that and then we can also do the agent download and installation
commands from here for Windows or for Linux and then run a PowerShell at scale
or bash to be able to do this across many many systems but for the moment
we're gonna go back to the portal here and just do one at a time
by clicking this generate scripts button to get started and then we select our
subscription that we want to be in as well as the resource group and I've got
one here called as your arc then we have to select our region and currently in
preview we're in three regions so since my machines are in the u.s. geography
I'll choose West us and then we select whether these are Windows or Linux
systems so mine are going to be Windows and then we hit next here and then if
you are using a proxy server you would put the proxy servers IP and port I am
NOT so I will just hit next and then in the tags section we'll add whatever tags
we like so the tags that I've added here are to help me understand what it is
that we are going to be managing here as well as where it's located so I have my
cost center and application we've seen those in the past this is also for my
lab environment the target systems here have a maintenance window of every third
Wednesday we have our support and our general contact as well as what location
these are on that we are supporting them in this case on-premise and you could
certainly add whatever tags fit your terminologies in your environments so
we'll hit next here and if this is your first time using Azure Ark you will have
to register here for the preview and that's just the click of a button and
then we can hit the download button here to download that script I flipped over
to one of my hyper-v servers and this is running two virtual machines here arc VM
one and arc VM two and we're going to paste our script here and that'll
download for us the particular agent package run the package and start the
agent program so that we can start managing this from Asia so I'll run each
these and what we need to do now is complete the onboarding process so we'll
copy this device login URL and paste that in our web browser and then we
provide our login code that we generated from our script and then we hit next and
then we provide our Azure credentials and we have successfully connected this
machine to Azure so I'll repeat that on the other VM just to save time and let's
go over to the azure portal and back in the portal we can just hit our refresh
button and we can see that we've got one of our VMs registered here and the other
one should be here in just a moment and we can see back in that VM we do have a
successful registration code here and our VM does get an ID just like every
other Azure resource and there we go we've got both systems registered in the
cloud and connected so now that we have them what can we actually do with them
well let's first click on one of them in the top overview section here we can see
all the tags that we registered which operating system platform this is on
including the version and our agent version and then we can always delete
the resource from here if we no longer need it and going down the blade we've
got our activity logs so all processes that we do against this resource is
going to show in the activity log so when we change anything do locks manage
access all of that will show just like every other as your resource and
speaking of access we can change our access controls and our role assignments
so that we have specific users or groups assigned to manage this asset and we can
always change the tags as well under the properties blade we can see the full
resource ID of this VM what resource group it's in etc under locks we can add
a read or delete lock here and those function just like all other locks in
the cloud and then the other stuff here is operations and logs and we'll come
back to those through the overview screen so this section down here how to
manage and govern our VMs we've already looked at part of that under manage
access which again goes back to access control and then we have our second
button here which is view compliance so when we click that that brings us to the
operation policy section we want to assign some new policies that
are specific or our arc systems so we'll go to assign an initiative so click the
scope button here and select down to our arc resource group and then we'll select
the initiative definition button and we'll filter by built-in initiatives and
we'll search for the word time there is an initiative for time zones so there
are two policies here the first will do an audit that the machine is in the
proper time zone if not then the remediation policy will be here to add
the VM to the correct time zone we'll add a quick description and then we'll
hit next and now we select the time zone that we want everyone set to in this
case I'll do it or Pacific time and we'll hit next and we could check this
box if we want a remediation task the automatically created but in this case
I'll leave that off and we'll be needing a managed identity for this process to
do the remediation and that means that we need to put it somewhere so east us
is fine with me and then we also need permissions associated with that ID and
in this case we need to contributor access so we hit next and then we'll hit
create and now that our initiative is staged all we have to do is wait for
this to do its checks and then we'll see its status
and we can see that we've come back not fully compliant here so if we click on
our policies we can see which policies are in violation and then we can even
come up with remediations for this because we have the deploy policy here
so we can click on remediation tasks and then we've got our definition already
set and if we want to view just the definition of this deploy policy we can
do that and make sure that it's what we want then you can also check this box if
you want to which will re-evaluate the status of these items before processing
the remediation and this will do up to 500 resources before it does the
remediation enforcement but we'll just click the remediate button here and we
can see that that remediation task is now in progress
so that'll take a few minutes to complete in the meantime let's go back
to as your arc and we'll go to our second VM and let's go to the logs
section so what we wanted to provide through the log integration into arc is
an easy way for you to see a resource ID correlated view of all of the logs on
this system if you want more telemetry data you can certainly deploy the Mme
agent which we'll do in a moment but if I run a query here that I use on a lot
of my systems give me the last several records in at your activity and we can
pull up any one of these records we can see what's going on what the compliance
check here in this case that was going on from our azure policy and we could
see which policy definitions were run against this so you can really see all
the detail just as if it was an azure resource because now effectively it is
but we can get that more full experience of log analytics if we deploy the Mme
agent and even the service mapping agent so inside my log analytics workspace
where I want this computer to be registered ago under these settings here
and go to advanced settings and then under my connected sources for either
Windows or Linux I click the download agent link and that will download in
just a few seconds and let's flip over to our VMs again and with those agents
downloaded now we'll run the installation and
hit next and agree to the terms the default install location is fine with me
and I'll check the box to connect to log analytics and hit next then I need to
provide my workstation ID and key and which cloud I'm connecting to and then
we'll hit next and I will choose to use Microsoft updates for this and hit
install and then we'll hit finish and I'll also install the dependency mapping
agent that just takes a few seconds and we'll hit finish on that as well so I'll
repeat these on the other VM as well in the background and let's go back to the
azure portal and so we're back in azure arc so let's click on one of our VMs and
we'll go to the logs section and then under the search through the logs link
here we'll click the link to run the last 500 logs so we see we've got some
performance information coming back as well as if we scroll down here we've got
some BM port information and this particular port is 4 0 3 4 2 so that
means that we should be able to see the service map data now so if we go to the
azure monitoring space and two virtual machines and we click on the map link at
the top so you have to set your workspace be the one where your VMs are
registered and then you can select your grouping in this case as your arc and
then we can see our VMs and of course we can click on the VM and then that'll
bring out the properties blade here and then we can see the Machine properties
just some general info about our system the number of processes that are running
and the azure info the name of the VM where it's located and the full ID if we
go under log events then we can see the full breakdown of the kinds of logs that
we have on this system and also if there are any alerts thankfully in this case I
don't have any and we can also click on the port information here we can see
that both of these VMs are talking on port 443 and port 80 and if we open the
drop down then we can see the list of the targets for that communication and
this one for example is an OP in site port so that's related to the azure mmm
agent so this kind of gives you a look and feel of what it's like to have an
azure Ark resource so let's go back and check on our compliance status we can
see our audit VM policy here is now completely compliant so our VMs have
switched their time zones so let's go check that out and we can see the guest
VM time is at one o'clock and the host system is at 4 o'clock and our VM is in
Pacific time versus our main system which is on Eastern Time so hope you've
enjoyed this quick look at Azure Ark and its potential for being a single
management interface for all of your systems whether they're in AWS GCP
Alibaba Rackspace on Prem or in Azure and then you can leverage Azure's
control plane which will have more features added to it over time that
would then allow you to have a truly unified management experience making
your life a lot easier so if you enjoyed this video please click the thumbs up
and let me know that in the comment section that you liked it and what
features you would like to see added to Azure Ark and while you're down there
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for today's video and we will see you in the next one happy learning