Every year, Microsoft holds its annual BUILD conference where they “announce new tools and solutions to empower developers to solve real world problems”, it’s also a great time to pick up some new skills and connect with the wider developer communities.
If you’ve attended any of the Microsoft conferences in the last few years, you would’ve seen a steady increase in hybrid content and solutions, as the world starts to realise that ‘Cloud-native’ doesn’t need to mean ‘Cloud-only’.
One of the awesome features of Azure VMs has been that they have their own identity in Azure AD, much like traditional servers on-prem have had computer accounts in Active Directory, and these identities can be used to authenticate against other Azure services such as Azure KeyVault.
Thanks to this native ability, it’s been possible to securely store objects such as secrets for User accounts, API Keys and things like Certificates in KeyVault and access them from other Azure Resources without having to create and store credentials those services.
After my previous article about the wonders of the new Azure Update Management Extension for SCVMM 2019, some of you might have been thinking that it was all well and good that VMM now automates the installation and configuration of the Azure Monitor Log Analytics Agent (MMA) for you when deploying new VMs, but what about all those existing servers out there?
Well unfortunately out of the box, Microsoft doesn’t provide a single installer UI that can target multiple machines, unless you’ve also got SCOM deployed and have configured it’s OMS integration as well.
Microsoft products are showing a clear theme these days, and the System Center Suite is no acception, hybrid scenarios and cloud augmentation.
And while there are those that see this as just a way to drive Azure adoption, this doesn’t need to be a bad thing.
In this article, I’m going to cover how to take advantage of Azure Update Management, using the new Extension in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2019.
