Microsoft added a new “Azure Arc Setup” feature in Windows Server 2022 via this month’s cumulative update. You can see it show up in the Start menu:
And there’s a folder created to hold the installer itself:
Having a feature is one thing, having it installed by default — as part of a Patch Tuesday update — is more questionable. To make matters worse, it also adds a task bar notification area icon to launch it. So it went from “useless consumer of disk space” to “UI clutter and (minor) RAM consumer.”
Fortunately, it isn’t hard to remove as documented here. You can use Server Manager:
Just uncheck the box. If you need to do this on a bunch of servers, you can use PowerShell as well:
Remove-WindowsFeature AzureArcSetup
Sadly that needs a reboot (how hard would it be to just kill the task bar process?):
Visual clutter gone, memory freed, disk space (mostly) reclaimed.
Out of Office Hours 
3 responses to “Remove the Azure Arc Setup “feature” installed on Windows Server 2022”
Thanks for this tip!
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I was looking for this, Thanks Michael. I’ll put it in a task sequence.
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Blimey — MIcrosoft really are a bunch of idiots — making extra work for me — as a result I will NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER use Azure Arc
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