Azure portal March 2022 updates

Compute > Virtual Machines

• Azure Arc virtual machines now in public preview - Azure Arc virtual machines now in public preview – AVS, VMware and Azure Stack

Containers > AKS/Kubernetes

• Two options for quick start applications for Azure Kubernetes Service now available

Intune 

• Updates to Microsoft Intune 

Let’s look at each of these updates in greater detail. 

Compute > Virtual Machines

Azure Arc virtual machines now in public preview – AVS, VMware and Azure Stack HCI 

With Azure Arc, customers can manage infrastructure from non-Azure environments, including on-premises, other public clouds, and edge devices. Azure Arc-enabled virtual machines extend these capabilities to common host platforms such as AVS, VMware, and Azure Stack HCI. Customers with existing non-Azure virtual machines can enable the underlying host as a “custom location” in Azure.  

With Arc-enabled VMware and AVS, administrators can also onboard large-scale environments to Azure management services such as Azure Monitor Log Analytics and Azure Policy Guest Configuration. This can be done by enabling guest management on many VMs at once through the Azure portal. Enabling guest management on a VM orchestrates the install of the Connected Machine agent, directly from Azure. Additionally, with the automatic discovery capabilities of the integration, available through the Azure portal, changes made directly through vCenter are synced with Azure.  

How does this work?  

The integration of Azure Arc virtual machines requires administrators to deploy a virtual appliance called an Arc resource bridge. The Arc resource bridge provides the connection between your VMware vCenter server or Azure Stack HCI cluster and Azure. It hosts the agents necessary for Azure Arc to communicate with your server.   

How to create an Azure Arc virtual machine through the Azure portal 

Note: At this point, you must have onboarded some or all of your existing private cloud resources to Azure: 

• For VMware resources, use the vCenter connect experience to create a vCenter, resource bridge, and custom location—all by navigating to Azure Arc in Portal. Then enable resource pools, clusters, hosts, datastores, networks, templates and existing VMs. Learn more 
• For Azure Stack HCI resources, access the “Resource Bridge” blade in Windows Admin Center under Cluster Manager Settings. Complete the prerequisite steps and enable images and networks direct from the WAC experience. Learn more 
• For Azure VMware Solution resources, ensure you have an AVS private cloud that is onboarded to Azure Arc. Then enable resource pools, clusters, hosts, datastores, networks, templates and existing VMs. Learn more 

1. From the Azure portal home screen, select Virtual machines. 
2. Then, select Create and Azure Arc virtual machine or Azure VMware Solution virtual machine. From this experience, select an existing custom location and associated resources (template, image, etc.).  Add disks, network interfaces, and tags prior to creation of the VM. Download an ARM template for automation. 
3. After creation of the VM, perform start/stop/restart operations. Edit RAM, CPU, disks, and network interfaces. Enable guest management — currently supported on VMware and AVS — to perform advanced operations such as installing Custom Script Extension, performing guest logging across Log Analytics, enabling Change tracking and Inventory solutions, and enabling Azure policies. 

 Start/Stop/Restart operations

       CPU/Memory controls

      Guest management (currently supported on VMware)

      A VMware virtual machine running Azure Arc

An Azure Stack HCI virtual machine running Azure Arc.

Extension support

Containers > AKS/Kubernetes

Two options for quick start applications for Azure Kubernetes Service now available

The Azure Portal now offers two new ways to get started with deploying Kubernetes applications. If you're looking for a quick all-in-one demo, you can now deploy the Azure Voting App example web application onto your cluster in just a few clicks using the Create a basic web application feature. If you have a container image of your own you'd like to deploy, there's now a guided walkthrough for deploying a single-image application that includes explanations for how to upload your image to a registry, some common properties of Kubernetes deployments and how they fit into a YAML template, and more. 

Step 1: Get started 

1.  From the Azure portal home page navigate to an existing Azure Kubernetes Service cluster 
2.  From the cluster overview page select the Get Started tab > Create a quick start application 

Step 2: Choose one of the Create a starter application options

Option 1: Create a basic web application: Azure Voting App example web application

1. Intro > Next           
2. Review YAML > Deploy
3. Success!
   You can verify what the voting app will look like by clicking on View the application > Close

Option 2: Create a single-image application: Single-image application 

1. Complete the Create a single-image application page with your information > Next

      ii. Deployment parameters

Review each of the options on this page then > Next

    iii. Review the YAML walkthrough > Deploy

iv. Success!

You can click on View the application if you deployed a web application with a service.

Intune

Updates to Microsoft Intune  

The Microsoft Intune team has been hard at work on updates as well. You can find the full list of updates to Intune on the What's new in Microsoft Intune page, including changes that affect your experience using Intune. 

Azure portal “how to” video series  

Have you checked out our Azure portal “how to” video series yet? The videos highlight specific aspects of the portal so you can be more efficient and productive while deploying your cloud workloads from the portal.  Check out our most recently published videos.

Next steps  

The Azure portal has a large team of engineers that wants to hear from you, so please keep providing us your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter @AzurePortal.  

Sign in to the Azure portal now and see for yourself everything that’s new. Download the Azure mobile app to stay connected to your Azure resources anytime, anywhere.  See you next month!