In this blog post we are going to have a quick look on how you can manage Azure Arc-enabled Azure Stack HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) directly from Microsoft Azure using the Azure Arc integration. As part of the Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure, Azure Stack HCI can be managed directly from the Azure control plane.
Azure Arc-enabled Azure Stack HCI provides you with unified resource management and a flexible cloud-connected architecture. Which means you can always stay up to date with the latest Azure security, performance, and capabilities with Azure Arc–enabled Azure Stack HCI. Discover, monitor, and manage the Azure Stack HCI hosts as well as the virtual machines (VMs) and containers running on them from within the Azure portal or the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) APIs.
After you have deployed and registered Azure Stack HCI with Azure Arc, you can now see the resource in the Azure portal. From here you can leverage different Azure management tools and hybrid cloud services.
Monitor Azure Stack HCI with Azure Monitor
You can now monitor your Azure Stack HCI clusters directly from Azure using Azure monitor. This also provides a great overview if you manage multiple Azure Stack HCI clusters.
Enable Azure Hybrid benefits for Azure Stack HCI
You can easily enable the Azure Hybrid benefits for your Azure Stack HCI cluster and other features directly from the Azure portal.
Deploy virtual machines (VMs) using the Azure Arc resource bridge
With the Azure Arc resource bridge integration, you can easily deploy new virtual machines on your Azure Stack HCI clusters running on-premises or at the edge.
You can use your own images stored locally, on a central Azure storage account, or even use Azure marketplace images.
Use Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal
If you need some more granular management, you can also use Windows Admin Center directly from the Azure portal. No VPN needed; the connection works securely over the integrated Azure Arc agent.
And more
I hope this blog and the video provided you with an overview on how you can manage your Azure Arc-enabled Azure Stack HCI cluster directly from Azure. This only converted some of the features, there is more than just that.
If you have any questions, feel free to comment below.
Tags: Azure, Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, Azure Stack HCI, Cloud, Cloud Management, Hybrid Cloud, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Virtualization Last modified: November 8, 2022
Hi Thomas. Thanks for your blog. Lots of interesting reads.
Question: Is there any way to play around with this for a sane amount of money in a home lab environment? Something I don’t have to tear down all the time to save $$$? I’m coming from an on prem infrastructure background and I’d love to try this out and get more familiar with hybrid setups. I’d go up to 50-100$ per month. But when I do a quick calculation running this on an NUC (like in your other guide), plus some AKS clusters, monitoring, etc. it gets expensive very quick. Core cost (10$/month) plus vCPU AKS (0.80$/day) alone is breaking the 100$/month… I’m missing something like the VMUG membership for VMware products for non-commercial “I want to learn” kinda scenarios. Sure there are cloud services involved which cost money. But I think the load and amount of data generated for those scenarios on Azure is minimal when most of the “heavy” services run on prem. Or did I miss something or miscalculate?
Thanks for your input :-)