What to know about Azure Arc’s hybrid-cloud server management

Azure Arc for servers, a centralized management tool that provides visibility into Azure data services, Kubernetes clusters, and servers running Windows or Linux, has been generally available since September, helping fulfill Microsoft’s stated intent to support enterprise hybrid-cloud architectures.

By extending Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Azure Arc can help streamline the management of technical resources on premises and in other clouds. ARM is a foundational management service used by a host of Azure tools to provide a consistent experience across a variety of resources including virtual machines, web applications, or data stores. Introduced in 2014, ARM enables a mature set of capabilities for Arc right out of the box.

In addition to features that are part of the currently available Azure Arc for Windows servers, other features—Azure Arc for Linux servers, Azure Arc for Kubernetes, and Azure Arc-enabled data services—are available in preview.

Here is a closer look at Azure Arc for servers.

Monitor, inventory, update