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Manage hybrid infrastructure at scale with Azure Arc

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Azure Lighthouse can help service providers use Azure Arc to manage customers' hybrid environments, with visibility across all managed Microsoft Entra tenants.

Azure Arc helps simplify complex and distributed environments across on-premises, edge and multicloud, enabling deployment of Azure services anywhere and extending Azure management to any infrastructure.

With Azure Arc–enabled servers, customers can manage Windows and Linux machines hosted outside of Azure on their corporate network, in the same way they manage native Azure virtual machines. Through Azure Lighthouse, service providers can then manage these connected non-Azure machines along with their customers' Azure resources.

Azure Arc–enabled Kubernetes lets customers attach and configure Kubernetes clusters outside of Azure. When a Kubernetes cluster is connected to Azure Arc, it appears in the Azure portal with an Azure Resource Manager ID and a managed identity. Through Azure Lighthouse, service providers can connect Kubernetes clusters and manage them along with their customer's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters and other Azure resources.

Tip

Though we refer to service providers and customers in this topic, this guidance also applies to enterprises using Azure Lighthouse to manage multiple tenants.

Manage hybrid servers at scale with Azure Arc–enabled servers

As a service provider, you can connect and disconnect on-premises Windows Server or Linux machines outside Azure to your customer's subscription. When you generate a script to connect a server, use the --user-tenant-id parameter to specify your managing tenant, with the --tenant-id parameter indicating the customer's tenant.

When viewing resources for a delegated subscription in the Azure portal, you'll see these connected machines labeled with Azure Arc. You can manage these connected machines using Azure constructs, such as Azure Policy and tagging, just as you would manage the customer's Azure resources. You can also work across customer tenants to manage all connected machines together.

For example, you can ensure the same set of policies are applied across customers' hybrid machines. You can also use Microsoft Defender for Cloud to monitor compliance across all of your customers' hybrid environments, or use Azure Monitor to collect data directly into a Log Analytics workspace. Virtual machine extensions can be deployed to non-Azure Windows and Linux VMs, simplifying management of your customers' hybrid machines.

Manage hybrid Kubernetes clusters at scale with Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes

You can manage Kubernetes clusters that have been connected to a customer's subscription with Azure Arc, just as if they were running in Azure.

If your customer has created a service principal account to onboard Kubernetes clusters to Azure Arc, you can access this account so that you can onboard and manage clusters. To do so, a user in the managing tenant must have been granted the Kubernetes Cluster - Azure Arc Onboarding built-in role when the subscription containing the service principal account was onboarded to Azure Lighthouse.

You can deploy configurations and Helm charts using GitOps for connected clusters.

You can also monitor connected clusters with Azure Monitor, use tagging to organize clusters, and use Azure Policy for Kubernetes to manage and report on compliance state.

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