Following the Wireguard series, I wanted to modernize my lab. One quick way to address that is to extend my two networks via Azure Arc so I can manage my resources more adequately.

Installing Azure CLI

The steps to install Azure CLI are pretty well described here so I won’t take time to do this. However, make sure you have the latest Azure CLI installed.

One note is that by default, az login will span a web browser to authenticate. If you don’t have any available in your setup, you can use az login --use-device-code, which will give you a device code so you can log from any other machine.

Creating the deployment script via Azure Arc Portal

In Azure Portal, Type Azure Arc, then click on “Add”.

Then select:

Servers > Add a Single Server

and fill in the details for your machine.

Resource Group: Create new or select existing
Region: Select Region Closest to your server
Operating System: Linux

You can also add Physical Location tags to define where the server is located. After you finish you can download the script.

Running the onboarding script

Download the file to your server, give permissions and run.

This script will do the following:

  1. Download an installation script from the Microsoft Download Center.
  2. Configure the package manager to use and trust the packages.microsoft.com repository.
  3. Download the agent from Microsoft’s Linux Software Repository.
  4. Install the agent on the server.
  5. Create the Azure Arc-enabled server resource and associate it with the agent.

Note that during the installation the agent will spawn a web browser to authenticate. If you don’t have any available in your setup, it will give you a device code so you can log from any other machine.

If all goes well, the script will connect the machine to Azure and provide you a link for the machine overview page.