Most organizations house traditional infrastructure like rack and stack environments running applications, databases, and server infrastructure that has been growing over the years. These environments still play an important role in the day-to-day business to provide services. There may also be one or more cloud environments like Microsoft Azure and AWS that are becoming more important to provide infrastructure and services that can scale globally across the operational landscape. Edge computing devices are gaining prominence in the connected world, and which must be managed remotely. Today, it can become a complex chore to control and govern these many environments that spread across data centers, multiple clouds, and the edge. More overhead tasks accumulate as IT administrators struggle to learn and operate various management tools.
Azure Arc, one of the breakthrough developments of Microsoft Azure services, allows users to centrally manage multiple environments across on-premises, edge, and multicloud from a single pane of glass. We can think of it like a management plane that can absorb any kind of resource to be managed under one view. Users will be able to extend their Azure management to any infrastructure, adopt cloud practices on premises, and run data and application services anywhere.
- Manage entire IT assets with a unified view, by projecting existing non-Azure, on premises, edge devices and other cloud resources into Azure Resource Manager.
- Manage servers, Kubernetes clusters, and databases and make them appear as though they are running in Azure.
- Regardless of the location of resources, use familiar Azure services and management capabilities.
- Along with traditional ITOps, use DevOps practices to support new cloud native patterns.
The following diagram unwraps the management ecosystem supports the Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.
First, we have the Windows Admin Center with Dell OpenManage Integration extension which is the edge/local always available management console. There could be one or more instances of WAC running per physical site in the data center environment intended to manage different fleets of servers. There shall always be IT administrative tasks such as full-stack life cycle management, and more, which can run from WAC for all systems to remain up to date.
As more Azure Stack HCI clusters are deployed, there is a must manage the environment at scale in a more efficient way. Azure Resource Manager, that is, the Azure control plane, is ideally suited to this task. Because Azure Stack HCI is designed to operate as a service in Azure, one can easily integrate it with other Azure management and governance services. In short, the bridge between Azure Resource Manager and infrastructure from other hyper-scaler cloud platforms and on-premises environments is Azure Arc.