Forum Discussion
Usayyad
Oct 07, 2022MCT
Enroll only selected servers in Azure Defender
We have 7-8 different subscriptions and have 1000s of VM. I have enabled Azure defender for Cloud for my subscription. However I want to exclude azure defender for selected servers (Vm's). Is it poss...
StanislavBelov
Microsoft
Oct 07, 2022Since Defender for Servers can only be enabled at the subscription level or higher (management groups or tenant) currently it's not possible to exclude certain servers from protection. We are considering providing more granular onboarding experience in the future. However, it's possible to control what servers get onboarded to MDE (which is one of the Defender for Servers features) by using Azure Policies we recently added:
[Preview]: Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint agent on Windows virtual machines
[Preview]: Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint agent on Linux virtual machines
[Preview]: Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint agent on Windows Azure Arc machines
[Preview]: Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint agent on Linux hybrid machines
Please keep in mind that in this case you would need to disable the integration with MDE in the subscription settings to disable auto onboarding of all VMs in this sub.
[Preview]: Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint agent on Windows virtual machines
[Preview]: Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint agent on Linux virtual machines
[Preview]: Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint agent on Windows Azure Arc machines
[Preview]: Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint agent on Linux hybrid machines
Please keep in mind that in this case you would need to disable the integration with MDE in the subscription settings to disable auto onboarding of all VMs in this sub.
Jonhed
Oct 07, 2022Iron Contributor
Does this mean the MDE integration is not required from a license standpoint?
Also, what kind of a delay would one be looking at, from resources being added to the policy scope until the extension is deployed?