WALinuxAgent VS omi

Hello azure Guru’s, I have a Rocky Linux Vm on azure 8.5 and waagent 2.7 and all is working fine as well azure backup, I had to update my is as I need to upgrade my foreman katello to 8.7, but the waagent did not get updated, and it is in starting state which doesn’t allow to start any backup, I found the waagent v2.8 on Microsoft GitHub which is supporting Rocky 8.7 https://github.com/Azure/WALinuxAgent/releases/tag/v2.8.0.11 Can anyone help her on how to accomplish this? Did anyone tried it? Thanks in advance Charles

https://github.com/Azure/WALinuxAgent - I think this is the equivalence of GCP guest-agent, serving similar functionalities, and is pre-installed on all official images, otherwise basic things like authentication and image baking will break.

By setting the provisionVMAgent property to false when creating a virtual machine, WALinuxAgent should run with all extensions disabled, and I think that's as minimal as a Linux VM can go on Azure.

This property, however, can't be set via https://github.com/ansible-collections/azure, which is of course another lovely OSS project by Microsoft. I didn't bother to send a PR.

The OMI agent seems to be a different beast that is way more obnoxious. The closest thing on GCP is probably the collectd agent and the fluentd agent installed for Stackdriver Monitoring and Stackdriver Logging? Plus whatever OS config to enable unattended upgrades.

I just learnt from this HN thread about the SSM agent on AWS. That one does seem equally obnoxious as the OMI agent.

The actual code that runs when you type scxadmin start is visible here (start_omi() function) : https://github.com/microsoft/omi/blob/e4d72481fa2f805148c9c8f4d0183b3e2d7814a8/Unix/installbuilder/service_scripts/service_control.linux

Maybe Microsoft will end up doing the latter: given their other moves with trying to shoehorn their ideas into Linux, I wouldn't be surprised if they go that way. But as it stands now, this particular tool does nothing but add automation-hostile patterns (having to accept a EULA for install, yay!), unnecessary kernel modules, and obnoxious log data to a given box.

But you should be able to update it using latest OMI release, without waiting for a SCOM agent update : https://github.com/microsoft/omi/releases/tag/v1.6.8-1