What is Azure ARC and how to deploy it for on-premise (virtual) machines?

Posted On April 30, 2024

In the last few years we see an evolving hosting landscape. Emerging cloud hosting and even cloud offboarding for certain workloads. But with this increasingly complex environments we need to find a way to manage and governance our clouds. With Azure Arc you can governance, manage and maintain your multi-cloud servers.

With Azure Arc you get a single pain of glass to:

Manage (physical) and virtual machines on-premise and cloud hosted in to the Azure Resource Manager Portal.
Manage resources like they where in Azure
Get monitoring insights and logging
Use Autopatch to update your on-prem / cloud hosted resources outside of Azure
Manage Kubernetes clusters, Databases and SQL manged instances like they are hosted in Azure
For virtual machines hosted on VMware vSphere and Azure Stack HCI you can provision, resize, delete and fully managed virtual machines
Use Azure VM Extensions

Pricing

Azure Arc isn’t free. but it is definitely affordable to implement it. Here is an overview of the current pricing in April 2024:

Azure Arc Enabled Servers: € 5,54 per server per month
Azure Arc Enabled SQL Server: € 67,41 per vCore(s) per month (license included)
Azure Arc Enabled SQL Managed instance: € 113,26 per vCore(s) per month (license included)
Azure Arc Enabled kubernetes cluster: € 1,85 per vCPU in the cluster (First 6 are free)

Manual how to join a Physical/Virtual Machine

STEP 1: Create resource in Azure

Go to the Azure Portal and from the top search bar search for Azure Arc.

Fill in the required fields:

Resourcegroup: Select a resource group or create one
Select the region for administrative purposes
Select the OS for the deployment script
Select the connectivity method, default is using a public endpoint.

Click next when ready

On the next page you will get a script that you can run on your on-prem machine to install the agent.

When you run the script, you get a sign-in prompt. Log in with your Azure admin credentials

If the authentication procedure fails, you will get an alternative login method. Go to the URL on your machine where you have active session in the Azure Portal, and go to https://microsoft.com/devicelogin and enter the code from your PowerShell session and follow the steps to activate the client.