Azure Arc, Hybrid Cloud Matt Quickenden Azure Arc, Hybrid Cloud Matt Quickenden

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.

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Azure Arc Matt Quickenden Azure Arc Matt Quickenden

Feature Parity for Azure Arc Server Resource Types?

When is an Azure Arc Server; not an Arc Server? A look at Azure Arc Server Resource types and the lack of feature parity between them

This is an Azure Arc Server (Server)

This is an Azure Arc Server (VMware)

This is an Azure Arc Server (HCI)

Introduction

Yes! Yes, Same Same… but different. Okay, so what? Not all Azure Arc Server VM objects are created equal. If we look a little closer at the Azure Resource Types we can see there are three different types listed here;

  • (Server) "type": "Microsoft.HybridCompute/machines"

  • (VMWare) "type": "microsoft.connectedvmwarevsphere/virtualmachines"

  • (HCI) "type": "microsoft.azurestackhci/virtualmachines"

Each of these types connecting via different methods to your Azure subscriptions, and along with this comes different functionality.

Server Blades

Let’s take a cursory look at (Server) using the standard connected Azure Connected Machine Agent. Lots of information, server, patch level, settings, operations, monitoring, big buttons to click great, appears feature rich and has the feel of Azure…. what’s your point?

Take note of the menu options on the left. You can also click on an image to enlarge it.

Okay, how about (VMWare)? It seems to be missing a few options and capability compared to the Server.

Well, what about (HCI)? Huh … It seems like its missing even more options.

VM Extensions

Unfortunately, this isn’t where the differences end. Taking a closer look at the Extensions available for each resource type. In particular, let’s say you want to start taking advantage of the new functionality around Arc-Enabled SQL Servers. Now the Arc SQL Extension is meant to Auto install… but only if you are using the (Server) type that is "type": "Microsoft.HybridCompute/machines"

Extension for (Server)

For the other two types, that Arc SQL Server extension is missing.

Extension for (VMware)

Extensions for (HCI)

HCI and VMWare

It is touted that it is easy to install Azure Arc for for your entire vSphere farm, and they are not wrong, you can import up to a maximum of 9500 VMs if you like with very little effort… up front. But you are not being offered all the benefits of an Azure Arc Server. You cant have the Arc SQL extension to monitor, operate and control your SQL Servers anywhere.

Digging into an HCI Cluster, you can Arc-enable the host nodes. These actually appear as first-class citizens of Azure as Azure Arc Servers.

Here is the cluster

and here is one of those nodes.

Here is where you would start the setup for the HCI Resource Bridge Setup, and through this is where you connect servers the HCI clusters guests.

but while the hosts have the full feature set of an Arc Server the HCI cluster guest VMs don’t.

VMware and HCI types are seriously lagging behind Arc Server and missing features and are essentially second-class citizens of Azure compared to the original HybridCompute resource type. You can See Updates, Azure Monitor, and SQL Extensions are all only available for Azure Arc (Server).

Resource Explorer

Through the Resource Explorer in the Azure Portal we can see the different types and more specifically the different ways they have been enabled. (Server)

We can see the (VMWare) which has a number of operations at the cluster level

and (HCI) which also has more operations at the cluster level than at the VM level.

Conclusion

Of course, you can’t install multiple types on the same server. I believe Azure Arc (Server) is the only way to go. Seeing the lack of parity in functionality between these types, it’s worth creating a method to deploy Azure Connected Agent directly on the machine yourself and at scale rather than leveraging time savings tools with the Resource Bridge that allow easy onboarding of vSphere and HCI cluster guests which leverage the Arc Resource Bridge.

That’s not to say the Resource Bridge isn’t useful for K8s or Arc Data Services. However, you should be aware of the lack of feature parity for HCI or VMWare installations of Arc Server Resource Type and make an informed decision about which Resource Type of Azure Arc Server you need or want in your environment.

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HybridCloud, Hybrid Cloud, Azure Arc Matt Quickenden HybridCloud, Hybrid Cloud, Azure Arc Matt Quickenden

SQL Counters via Azure Arc

Walk through how to collect SQL counter using Data collection Rule and displaying the results on a workbook an Azure Dashboard.

Microsoft is rapidly expanding the services and features available from the Azure Arc SQL Extension. As this moves into GA and more visibility features get added and importantly, features that allow actions EG controlling backup and even patching using Azure to create a management layer for your SQL Server estate outside of Azure becomes more viable.

Let’s take a brief look at grabbing SQL-specific performance counters to Azure Monitor Metrics.

We need to create a Data Collection Rule (DCR). I am not using Data Collection Endpoints (DCE), but you may want to consider this in your environment.

Select the Arc Resource you want to add

now we need to add some Performance counter

it will add a bunch by default; select None, then Custom to clear all.

Unfortunately, currently, you can not see the SQL counters from this view, so you’ll have to go collect what you want from another source.

You can use Perfmon, unfortunately you cant copy from perfmon.

this query will provide a list

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters;

Here is a list I have extracted for this DCR

\SQLServer:General Statistics\User Connections
\SQLServer:General Statistics\Logins/sec
\SQLServer:General Statistics\Transactions
\SQLServer:Databases(_Total)\Active Transactions
\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\Batch Requests/sec
\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\Logical Connections
\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\SQL Compilations/sec
\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\SQL Re-Compilations/sec

Paste it in line by line, Add, tick, Delete line, next counter. Adjust the Sample rate as needed. I have used the default 60 seconds. For large SQL servers estates, you might want to consider increasing this depending on your needs.

It’s worth considering building a template for this if you want to do this repeatedly. This resource type has some challenging layers to work through for deployment. Microsoft reference material can be found here.

we pipe these into Azure Monitor Metrics Which is still in preview and for this exercise I will also push the data into a log analytics instance.

as of this writing the metrics for hybrid compute fail to be added to scope of Azure Monitor. For the remainder of this example we will use Log Analytics Workspace for metrics.

Heading over to the Log Analytics Workspace. You can create various Kusto queries to integrate these SQL Metrics 

Perf
| where ObjectName == 'SQLServer:General Statistics' and CounterName == 'User Connections'
| project TimeGenerated, Computer, ObjectName, CounterName, CounterValue
| summarize avg(CounterValue) by bin(TimeGenerated,60m) , Computer
| render timechart

You can send this to a Workbook or Dashboard

We can now see the data on a chart in a workbook. By saving the you can give the workbook a name and save it to a resource group

Alternatively, you can publish this to an Azure Dashboard. I am going to use the dashboard I created here Arc SQL Extension - Best Practices Assessment — Crying Cloud

This displays a tile here. You can continue to add tiles and edit the queries. You build workbooks and dashboards to target the specific metrics about your Arc-enabled SQL Servers.

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Hybrid Cloud Matt Quickenden Hybrid Cloud Matt Quickenden

"CannotChangeInventoryId is not allowed" Enabling a VMWare OS template in Azure via VMWare Arc-Connected vSphere

While working on a VMware Arc-connected instance of vSphere I had an issue enabling a template for use in Azure. I had created a template deleted it then tried to recreate it with the same name and received the following error.

{"code":"DeploymentFailed","message":"At least one resource deployment operation failed. Please list deployment operations for details. Please see https://aka.ms/DeployOperations for usage details.","details":[{"code":"CannotChangeInventoryId","message":"Resource 'template-Win2019STD' was previously configured with InventoryItemId 'vmtpl-vm-2015'. Changing InventoryItemId is not allowed."}]}

In the resource group and select show hidden items, we can see a template with that name

if we actually look at the object or JSON view we can see this is the ID from the error

simply delete the template causing the issue

Now when you try to “Enable in Azure” it should work.

This also works with the other VMware types that can be enabled.

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Hybrid Cloud Matt Quickenden Hybrid Cloud Matt Quickenden

Update Management Center and Azure Arc for Linux Server Patch Management

Let’s say you want to redeploy some of your on-premises servers for a Kubernetes cluster or LXD cluster. In our MAAS portal we can select the appropriate ‘Ready’ systems we want to deploy. In this demonstration we have a range of different hardware selected here, an HP blade 460c, a dell blade M630, a Cisco C220, and 2 Quanta boxes.

  • Select desired OS and Release

  • check ‘Cloud-init user-data

  • Paste in the Azure Arc Connected script. You need to include the bash header ‘#!/bin/bash’.

  • Start deployment

Linux Bash script for reference. This was generated by the Azure Portal using an onboarding agent. You can find more details about this here Azure Arc & Automanage for MAAS — Crying Cloud

#!/bin/bash

# Add the service principal application ID and secret here
servicePrincipalClientId="xxxxxx-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxxxxxx"
servicePrincipalSecret="xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

export subscriptionId=xxxxxx-xxxxx-xxx-xxx-xxxxxx
export resourceGroup=ArcResources
export tenantId=xxxxx-xxxx-xxx-xxxx-xxxxxx
export location=eastus
export authType=principal
export correlationId=d208f5b6-cae7-4dfe-8dcd-xxxxxx
export cloud=AzureCloud

# Download the installation package
output=$(wget https://aka.ms/azcmagent -O ~/install_linux_azcmagent.sh 2>&1)
if [ $? != 0 ]; then wget -qO- --method=PUT --body-data="{\"subscriptionId\":\"$subscriptionId\",\"resourceGroup\":\"$resourceGroup\",\"tenantId\":\"$tenantId\",\"location\":\"$location\",\"correlationId\":\"$correlationId\",\"authType\":\"$authType\",\"messageType\":\"DownloadScriptFailed\",\"message\":\"$output\"}" https://gbl.his.arc.azure.com/log &> /dev/null; fi
echo "$output"

# Install the hybrid agent
bash ~/install_linux_azcmagent.sh

# Run connect command
sudo azcmagent connect --service-principal-id "$servicePrincipalClientId" --service-principal-secret "$servicePrincipalSecret" --resource-group "$resourceGroup" --tenant-id "$tenantId" --location "$location" --subscription-id "$subscriptionId" --cloud "$cloud" --correlation-id "$correlationId"

You may also find it useful to Tag the servers with a project name and possibly lock them.

Added a tag ‘ArcConnected’ and you can see all the other automatic tags added by MAAS

And we can see the servers locked in MAAS

Importantly you can see the servers added to Azure Portal as Arc Servers

Drilling into one of the servers we can see the name assigned by MAAS, the OS we chose to deploy, the hardware model, agent version, etc.

Depending on your needs you can do a range connect it to Azure ‘Automanage’ or to ‘Update management center’ for instance. Lets go ahead and configure patches through Update Management Center (currently in preview)

As the assessments finish, we can see the updates for the on-premise servers through the Azure portal for each of the servers

Update settings to Enable Periodic Assessment every 24 hours is optional

Next, we can ‘Schedule updates’ and create a repeating schedule

ensure that we select our on-premise servers, and define what type of patches. In this case we only want to push Critical Updates and Security patches. If you select other Linux patches Azure will patches things like snaps and you may want to do those type of patches in a more controlled manor.

You can browse the ‘Maintenance Configuration’ and make any necessary changes

We can validate update history using the portal also.

We have deployed Ubuntu servers using MAAS, connected them to Azure using Azure Arc during installation with scripted onboarding, viewed missing updates, scheduled daily assessments, and created a repeating schedule to ensure critical updates and security patches are pushed to these systems.

This method could be used to manage systems in any other cloud system, bringing the management of Linux patching into the Azure control plane

This is a small window into what can be done using Azure Arc to help with operational activities in a Hybrid cloud environment

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