Home Lab - Adding our VMWare Deployment to Azure Arc

In the previous post, we looked at some post-deployment steps to enable some additional functionality for our Azure Stack HCI cluster. In this post we are going to look at connecting our VMWare host (on top of which our Hyper-V host sits) to Azure Arc too using a Resource Bridge. Before we get started it is worth noting that currently this functionality is in preview and only vCenter Server versions 6.7 and 7 are supported. a complete list of prerequisites is here. To get started, log into your Azure portal and search for "Azure Arc" in the top search bar and select the Azure Arc result:

Select 'Infrastructure' tab from the available options:

From there, select the VMWare vSphere (preview) option by clicking on the 'Add' button:

You will then be presented with the option to use and existing Resource Bridge, or create a new one. In short, the Resource Bridge will enable custom locations, cluster extensions, and other Azure Arc agents in order to deliver the level of functionality with the private cloud infrastructures it supports. Visually, this looks as follows:

For our case, we will be creating a new Resource Bridge as follows:

Complete the necessary config as follows:

Next, specify any relevant tags as needed:

And finally, click on the 'Register' button to begin the registration process:

Once started, you will get a notification indicating that the registration is in progress:

Once completed successfully, you will then be provided with a script that you will need to download to your local machine:

Before running the script, you will need several inputs for the script as detailed here. Once you have the inputs, run the script in an elevated PowerShell session and you should see something similar to this:

At various points the script will ask you for some additional inputs but ultimately, it should complete as follows:

You will be provided a link at the end of the script which will point you to the new VMWare vCenter object in Azure as follows:

Clicking on the 'View vCenter VMs' button successfully queries my on premise hardware and display it in Azure as follows:

Congrats! Azure Arc now has insight into your VMWare host and can help manage and deploy things as necessary. Look out for the next post where we will further leverage Azure Arc by deploying an edge Kubernetes cluster which is Azure Arc connected.