Enhanced management of Azure Stack HCI from Azure

Article
02/26/2024

Applies to: Azure Stack HCI, version 22H2 and later

This guide describes the feature in the May 2023 cumulative update for Azure Stack HCI, version 22H2, that enables enhanced management from Azure.

About enhanced Azure management

In the May 2023 cumulative update for Azure Stack HCI, version 22H2, a feature enhancement has been made to the Azure Stack HCI operating system that enables additional capabilities for Azure Stack HCI systems to be managed from Azure.

This feature enhancement includes support of managed identity for Azure Stack HCI cluster resources in Azure to enable Azure services such as Azure Monitor and Azure Site Recovery. The managed identity is created when your Azure Stack HCI system is registered with Azure and persists for the lifetime of the Azure Stack HCI cluster resource in Azure. The managed identity communicates with the resource provider in Azure and is used to authenticate your Azure Stack HCI system with Azure.

This feature also includes Azure Service Bus integration to allow for an improved user experience managing your Azure Stack HCI cluster from Azure.

Benefits

The managed identity serves as an identity for the various components of your cluster to authenticate with Azure and enables support for the following scenarios:

Monitor Azure Stack HCI Insights with Azure Monitor Agent – The enhanced Azure Stack HCI Insights feature in Azure Monitor requires the Azure Monitor Agent instead of the legacy Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA). The Azure Monitor Agent uses managed identity to send logs and data to your Log Analytics workspace.

For more information, see Monitor Azure Stack HCI with Azure Monitor Insights.
Protection of VM workloads via Azure Site Recovery - You can protect your business critical VM workloads running on Azure Stack HCI cluster by replicating the VMs using the Azure Site Recovery agent which is deployed as an Arc for Server extension. The Azure Stack HCI cluster managed identity is used to download a key credential file from Azure. This file lets the agent know which service to talk to and which Recovery services vault to communicate with. This mechanism allows us to scope the access to the Recovery services vault to only the applicable Azure Stack HCI clusters.

The Arc for Server extension uses the cluster managed identity to download the key credential file to every node of the cluster. If a new node is added to your cluster, Azure Stack HCI automatically triggers the installation of Arc for Server extension for Azure Site Recovery on the new node. In the absence of managed identity, this was previously a manual step that required you to install the agent to each node that was added to the cluster.

For more information, see Protect VM workloads with Azure Site Recovery on Azure Stack HCI.

With this feature enhancement, the following actions can be initiated from Azure and applied to the Azure Stack HCI system within seconds:

Enabling a Windows Server guest license subscription via the Azure portal. For more information, see Activate Windows Server VMs on Azure Stack HCI.
Changing the level of service health data sent to Azure. For more information, see Azure Stack HCI data collection to understand the diagnostic data that Azure collects for your cluster.

Enable enhanced management

To enable the enhanced management feature, you will need to install the latest cumulative update for Azure Stack HCI, version 22H2 and rerun registration for your cluster.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure to complete the following prerequisites.

To reach the Azure Service Bus endpoint required by this feature, include the following URL to your outbound firewall allowlist:

URL: servicebus.chinacloudapi.cn
Ports: 443, 5671, 5672

Enable enhanced management for Azure Stack HCI, version 22H2

For clusters running version 22H2, to enable Azure management and managed identity, follow these steps:

Install the May 2023 cumulative update for Azure Stack HCI, version 22H2.
On one of the cluster nodes, install or update to the latest Az.StackHCI PowerShell module that includes the latest registration script changes.
- To install the module, run the following command in PowerShell:
```
Install-Module -Name Az.StackHCI
```
- To update the module, run the following command in PowerShell:
```
Update-Module -Name Az.StackHCI
```
Skip this step and go to the next step if your cluster is already registered. If your cluster has not been previously registered to Azure, register your cluster with Azure. The registration process configures a managed identity and Azure Service Bus to enable the new management feature.
If the cluster is already registered to Azure, rerun the registration. Use of RepairRegistration parameter will help configure a managed identity and Azure Service Bus while retaining other information such as resource name, resource group and other settings.
```
Register-AzStackHCI  -SubscriptionId "<subscription_ID>" -RepairRegistration
```

Note

The registration fails if you use an older version, earlier than 1.4.1 for your Az.StackHCI PowerShell module. The updated module is backward compatible and will run on OS versions with or without the new feature update installed.

Next steps

Learn more about how to protect Azure Stack HCI VM workloads with Azure Site Recovery