Defender for Servers P2 – Highlighting limitations in on-prem functionality

In Defender for Cloud you can license Defender for Servers for your on-prem servers through both “Azure Arc” and “Direct onboarding” without Arc. The functionality in Defender for Servers Plan 2 is limited when not run in a cloud native VM such as Azure, GCP or AWS.

Therefore I have created the table below to highlight what works where depending on the deployment type, showcasing how running Defender for Servers is different across Cloud, Arc and non-arc deployments.

Overview of functionality

Color coding:

Features:

This was made best effort 24.02.2025. Changes may occur.

There might be functionality for Azure Native VMs that is also brought to Azure Local, but I have not looked into Defender for Servers functionality here yet.

Is something wrong or just completely off? Please let me know in the comments!