Interesting changes to Arc Agent 1.34 with expanded detected properties

Microsoft just pushed out a change in Azure Arc Connected Agent 1.34 and with this comes some enrichment of Hybrid Servers detected properties.

This is what the properties looked like prior to the update.

Agent 1.33 and earlier

Okay… so what’s new and different?

New detected properties for Azure Arc Connected Agent 1.34

serialNumber, ProcessNames and totalPhysicalMemory

resources
| where ['type'] == "microsoft.hybridcompute/machines" 
| extend processorCount = properties.detectedProperties.processorCount,
    serialNumber = properties.detectedProperties.serialNumber,
    manufacturer= properties.detectedProperties.manufacturer,
    processorNames= properties.detectedProperties.processorNames,
    logicalCoreCount = properties.detectedProperties.logicalCoreCount,
    smbiosAssetTag = properties.detectedProperties.smbiosAssetTag,
    totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes = properties.detectedProperties.totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes,
    totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes = properties.detectedProperties.totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes
| project name,serialNumber,logicalCoreCount,manufacturer,processorCount,processorNames,totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes,totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes

This unlocks organizations to collect processor, serial number and memory information in a simple fashion via Azure Arc infrastructure. This can be used to look at things like consolidation and migration planning, perhaps decommissioning aging hardware even warranty lookup if you don’t have current hardware CMDB.

Azure Arc delivers SQL Databases as Resources in Azure

The SQL extension for Arc-connected servers itself isn’t new, however, it has had a new feature added that is currently in preview; which is the ability to create Azure resources that represent your SQL Database through the Arc-connected Servers.

You can see this will detect objects for SQL instances, named SQL instances, and the databases themselves become objects in Azure

If you already have this installed this is one configuration setting you may want to check and that is “Has NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM in the sysadmin role.” This is listed in the prerequisites of the install instructions that can be found here View SQL Server databases - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

It is worth noting this currently works only for the Microsoft.HybridCompute type and not for example the VMware connected Arc systems Microsoft.ConnectedVMwarevSphere.

There are some properties here listed as unknown however, this is a bug that has already been fixed.

This is the next step to bringing SQL databases into the Azure control plane, creating alerts on recovery models, encryption state, or perhaps statistic creation. Enabling more visibility and control into the Hybrid Cloud journey.

This is the first public preview of this feature and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for future revisions and enhancements.

MAAS Image Builder Exclude Update by KB#

This briefly shows how to alter the image builder scripts to exclude broken KBs for specific OS versions. This example shows excluding Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Insider Preview (KB5019765) on an HCI image.

View fullsize

Trying to build a newer HCI Maas image and receive an error trying to download an update via release channel. Specifically, Windows 11 insider preview KB5019765

If you edit the Logon.ps1 found in the UnattendedResource folder from cloudbase/windows-imaging-tools: Tools to automate the creation of a Windows image for OpenStack, supporting KVM, Hyper-V, ESXi and more. (github.com) you can see there is a section that allows you to create a blacklist of KBs for different OS version.

View fullsize

Using PowerShell [System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version you can find the OS version

View fullsize

Finally add a record for the OS version and KB you want to exclude

Which is displayed via verbose output during build

Azure Arc Connected vSphere (Preview)

This isn’t a groundbreaking demo in terms of the end result; we deploy some VMs, however, the interesting conversation is about how we got there and what we can do with these VMs. With Azure Arc, we can now connect vSphere to the Azure platform, meaning using Azure we can use cloud methods to deploy servers such as Azure templates. This is a step towards creating an environment with a single-pane-of-glass, at least to view and query your IT estate.

The features today are simple, but Azure is a constantly evolving platform and when you are connected, as new features and services are developed and released, and the ecosystem evolves, you can grow with it.

The goal of this article is to give you some ideas about why connecting your vSphere cluster to Azure via Azure Arc and how having VMWare-connected VMs can start providing a path to a consistent cloud experience. This allows administrators to develop management processes in the cloud without requiring a complete lift and shift of all existing servers. As of this writing, this feature is still in preview.

View fullsize

This is assuming you have deployed the Azure Arc bridge to connect your on-premises resources. This process is evolving and is not meant to be the focus of this article.

Once connected using the Azure portal, you can do a simple VM deployment.

Click, click, VM name, deploy-demo-01 next, next, finish.

View fullsize

We can save this as an ARM template, I created a template spec and saved it to Azure, which I am using through the portal to deploy VM deploy-demo-02 but you could use pipeline tools such as Azure DevOps or other CI/CD tooling or templates from PowerShell command line.

View fullsize

You could use PowerShell to deploy that ARM Template to deploy deploy-demo-03

View fullsize

View fullsize

you could convert this into a Bicep template if that’s your standard.

View fullsize

What I do have now is 3 new vSphere hosted VMs all deployed via Azure ARM

View fullsize

however, I never touched the VMware console, and I now have an Azure Resource object.

You have access to basic controls. You could assign this via Azure RBAC rather than having administrators and users needing to access the vSphere console. There are options for resizing, adding disks, and managing networking, standardizing the experience.

View fullsize

In addition, you can also onboard existing deployed vSphere VMs and enable guest management to help manage things like VMware tools versions from Azure.

While the monitoring agent options are changing, I’ll keep this simple. You could also include VM extension such as the monitoring agent in your template.

which in term allows us to query these servers via Log analytics. This means it can be connected to alerts like low disk space and other services like Azure Policy.

View fullsize

This space is changing, there are a lot of new features coming to Azure Arc which we see as a gateway to connecting your existing IT servers to Azure allowing companies to gain the benefits of Azure without having to execute migrations for every server.

Hopefully, you found this insightful or informative