With Azure Arc, our mission is to bring comprehensive capabilities of the to customers wherever they run workloads. We are excited to share some of the new integrations and improvements that will enable you to bring all the management innovations in the Azure cloud to your hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Start your journey anywhere!

Many of our customers have large investments in distributed hybrid infrastructure built on platforms such as VMware vSphere and System Center. Organizations, regardless of size, continue to drive their digital transformation journey to reap the benefits coming from the delivery of cloud-connected experiences across diverse deployment scenarios. One of the challenges we hear organizations facing in their digital transformation journeys today is how to deliver cloud-connected experiences reliably across a globally distributed footprint.

To help facilitate this transition, we are excited to introduce Azure Arc-enabled solutions for VMware vSphere and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, to enable customers to manage their VM deployments running anywhere using Azure Arc.

Arc-enabled VMware enables customers to manage their VMware deployments running anywhere including Azure VMware Solution (AVS). Customers can seamlessly connect their hybrid infrastructure, and enable Azure management, observability, and security solutions, while benefiting from the existing lifecycle management capabilities. Alternatively, customers can start with Azure Arc-enabled servers and add Azure management solutions, provision VMs and virtual hardware capabilities through Azure Arc-enabled VMware vSphere. These same set of management operations can be performed on your System Center VMM environments providing you with a consistent set of experiences and integrations regardless of your hybrid infrastructure stack.

Update your systems with confidence

For enterprise customers, keeping their machines secure, compliant, and up to date with the latest updates across their hybrid environment is a challenge, not to mention maintaining the on-premises update management systems. Azure Update Manager solves this problem by providing a single, easy-to-use solution to help consistently manage and govern updates with greater control for all machines (Windows or Linux, on-Azure or off-Azure).

With the Azure Update Manager, customers get a fully managed SaaS service that is fully integrated with the Azure control plane, to govern update settings on all machines in their environments, enforce same maintenance windows for machines grouped together based on standard Azure constructs (subscription, location, resource group, tags etc.), and control changes to update settings with machine level Azure RBAC. They can oversee update compliance for their entire fleet of machines in Azure, on-premises, and multi cloud environments from a standard dashboard and create custom reports for deeper understanding of the update history.

Plan for your Windows Server and SQL end of support

Many customers still have Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 server which end of support in October 2023. If you are unable to upgrade your operating system or migrate those workloads we provide an option of purchasing extended security updates for three more years of critical security updates from Microsoft to protect their End-of-Life infrastructure.

Windows Server 2012 ESUs enabled by Azure Arc affords customers financial, management, and security benefits beyond traditional Windows Server 2012 ESUs from Volume Licensing. Customers have no upfront annual commitments and are able to pay for what they need with the flexibility to deactivate ESU licenses mid-year as they migrate and modernize workloads to Azure. As an Azure billed service, WS2012 ESUs enabled by Azure Arc count towards customers’ Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments and can apply Azure Consumption Discounting (ACD) for price savings. And finally, customers benefit from free access to Azure Update Manager, Azure Machine Configuration, and Azure Change Tracking and Inventory (AMA based) for their Azure Arc-enabled servers enrolled in WS2012 ESUs through Arc. This same experience can be used to acquire your SQL Server 2012 ESUs.

Get started today

You can use Azure Arc and the basic management capabilities like tagging, template-based deployments, role-based access control, remote access via SSH and Windows Admin Center, and basic inventory for FREE and you will not be charged until to explicitly onboard our paid solutions.

Getting started on by connecting your VMware, System Center, or virtual/physical machine to Azure Arc or watching this great in-depth video by John Savill. You can optionally try out these capabilities in our Arc Jumpstart environment.

Join the community

On behalf of the entire team, thank you so much for your interest in Azure Arc. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or comments.

If you are interested in joining our quarterly Arc customer and engineering virtual meetups, please sign up here: https://aka.ms/ArcServerForumSignup