Azure Automanage for virtual machines – Public Preview

The cloud has simplified and reduced the operational expense (OpEx) and management burden in numerous areas of IT. Many systems that previously ran on-premises and were complex to maintain are now simple ‘point & click’ services in the cloud.

Likewise, running virtual machines (VMs) in Microsoft Azure opens the door to a wealth of convenient services that simplify and automate day-to-day operational requirements in areas such as security, anti-malware, compliance, disaster recovery, etc. We also provide best practices guidance outlining the services that we recommend you onboard your VMs to including each service’s respective configuration. You can find this actionable guidance in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.

A new service known as Azure Automanage reduces the OpEx burden for VMs further by automating the guidance mentioned above. Through its virtual machine best practices capability, select services are discovered, onboarded, and configured across the entire lifecycle of both dev/test and production VMs. You can add VMs individually or do so at scale safe in the knowledge that if your VMs deviate from best practices, Azure Automanage will detect and automatically correct it.

Specifically, the VM best practices capability of Azure Automanage does the following five things:

1. Intelligently onboards to select best practices Azure services 
2. Automatically configures each service per Azure best practices 
3. Configures guest operating system per Microsoft baseline configuration 
4. Automatically monitors for drift and corrects for it when detected   
5. Simple experience: Point, click, set, forget -> done
   

The capabilities of Azure Automanage translate into the following customer benefits: 

• Reduced cost by automating Windows Server management 
• Improved workload uptime with optimized operations 
• Implementation of security best practices