So can Azure Arc handle patch management for servers and infrastructure outside of Azure?

Absolutely.

This is an area where Azure Arc can help a lot.

Today, patching often means different tools or different environments, WSUS or SCCM for Windows, scripts for Linux, or separate cloud portals.

And with Azure Arc, this all happens consistently from one place.

You can see Azure Update Manager, which I have open here.

Each server has an update status indicating if it's got pending updates or not.Azure Update Manager continuously assesses the update compliance of your managed servers on a schedule, and you can manually trigger assessments by selecting resources and hitting Check For Updates.

Now, software updates are one type of configuration management, but what other types of configurations can you manage here?