>> Hey friends, Azure is a great Cloud platform,
but some workloads are still best served on-premises,
which is why many people are now using
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure or HCI.
Azure Stack HCI is
a host operating system delivered as an Azure service,
which means it's always up-to-date and
you can manage it all from the Azure portal.
Cosmos Darwin is here to show me how it
works today on Azure Friday.
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>> Hey friends, I'm Scott Hanselman.
It's another episode of Azure Friday.
I'm here with Cosmos Darwin and we're talking about Azure HCI.
I think you brought some wonderful toys
behind you there on the desk. How are you?
>> I did. I'm doing well, Scott, thank you. How are you?
>> I am lovely and I'm
thrilled to be talking to you because I want
to learn all about what Azure Stack HCI is.
>> Yeah. Well, it was
pretty big news last week at Microsoft Inspire.
It's a new Cloud Service from Microsoft Azure that
provides a new way for customers to run
virtual machines on their premises.
So it's an HCI software Stack that you install on your servers,
but then you can manage it
and other things through the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
>> Okay. When we say HCI and CI,
what does that mean for people who aren't familiar?
>> Good question. HCI stands for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.
It has really in recent years become
the normal way to deploy new servers.
The idea, if you want to think of it this way,
is that your virtualization hosts
where you're actually running your VMs,
bring their own storage,
bring their own networking,
so it means you don't need a separate storage array
or SAN or NAS anymore.
You can often have fewer network appliances as well.
Overall, HCI helps you simplify how you operate your data center,
tends to increase performance,
and tends to reduce costs.
>> Interesting. I remember when virtual machines first came
out and there were specs on exactly what you needed to do,
and here's a whole plan,
a blueprint for exactly what you need to do to make
your physical installation match
the requirements of what it was to run a VM,
this is 20 plus years ago.
Now, it seems like the software
is flexible enough that it can pretty much
use whatever we throw at it and levels the playing field?
>> Yeah. There was an element of what you're
describing in the early days of HCI as well.
It's been a few years since
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure started to become really prevalent.
Nowadays, we see it as the normal way people deploy
new servers from core data center
to branch offices and edge locations.
Initially, the hardware bill of materials was pretty prescribed,
you had to be pretty careful.
These days, as you'll see with Azure Stack HCI,
you can really run this
on an immense variety of different systems.
As a customer, you can choose hardware that suits your needs.
>> Now, this might be an oversimplification,
but that's what all good analogies are.
Am I bringing a tiny sliver of Azure to myself,
and I run a little Azure in my home office?
>> Yeah, you can think of it that way.
Actually, a good way to unpack Azure Stack HCI is as two things.
First of all, it's an HCI software Stack, and then second of all,
it's delivered as an Azure Service and
you're getting into the second one
a little bit with your question.
What we mean when we say it's delivered as an Azure Service,
is as a customer,
you see this in the Azure portal.
You pay for this through your existing Azure subscription.
You get support for it on your existing Azure support contract.
So in many many ways,
this looks and feels and behaves just
like any other Cloud service that you would use from Azure.
It just happens to be that the substance of this service
is Azure's latest hypervisor
with built-in software defined storage and networking,
which you run on your servers on your premises.
>> Wow, that is amazing.
>> Yeah. We're seeing an awful lot of interest from
customers and it makes sense.
There's a huge move
where most workloads are moving into a public Cloud.
But at the same time,
customers are very clear-eyed
that they have certain applications or
certain things that are going to remain on-prem, possibly forever.
There are good and durable reasons,
whether it's data sovereignty or latency or things like that.
That's really where
the Azure Stack portfolio of products comes in.
We've already talked about Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack Edge,
Azure Stack HCI is just the newest member of this family.
They're all really toward that aim
of helping customers to keep the workloads on-prem that
need to stay there while still taking advantage
of Cloud-based management and other Cloud-based advantages.
Because those advantages are
really clear even when the workloads are on-prem.
>> Is this what we are talking about when we say Hybrid Cloud?
It's that relationship between a Cloud that is
infinitely scalable in the Cloud elsewhere,
someone else's computers, and
then something that's happening on-prem,
whether it be classic virtual machines
or a more formal Azure HCI Stack?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
Hybrid is the perfect word.
When we talk with customers,
what we hear is increasingly their plans for
the future are they envision their IT infrastructure to straddle,
some amount of things running on-prem,
other things running up in the public Cloud,
and they really want a single control plane that they can use
to manage all of that IT estate,
and that's one of the big things
that you get with Azure Stack HCI,
is although the cluster physically sits on your premises,
you can actually control it through the Azure portal.
In fact, I can give you a demo of that if you'd like.
>> Let's do it. Let's see it.
>> Yeah. What I'm going to show you here
is the out-of-the-box behavior with an Azure Stack HCI.
So I've installed Azure Stack HCI on two servers,
I haven't had to pull down an agent,
I haven't had to run a big complicated script and yet,
in spite of having not done any of those things,
what you'll see is I can just go to
the Public Cloud Azure portal and I'll see my Azure Stack HCI.
In my browser, I'm going to go to portal.azure.com.
This is just the regular Azure portal on the public Internet.
So if you're an Azure user,
you've seen this before, it's very familiar.
What you haven't seen is this new Azure Stack HCI Cloud service.
This is a new resource provider
built by Microsoft that's actually projecting
my on-premise's HCI up into the Azure Resource Manager,
into ARM as a first-class Azure resource.
I can click on one of them, for example.
Here is my ContosoHCI cluster.
You'll see that this is directly in the Azure portal
I get some nice information about these clusters.
I can see that it's got two server nodes,
I can see things like the software version that it's running,
how many physical cores it has,
things like that, it's connected to Azure.
This is just the beginning, this view is going to
get richer over time as the team
builds out more information
and more management options on this page.
But even already, there's quite a few things that you can do here,
things where really Azure Stack HCI is benefiting from
all the standard constructs of Azure Resource Manager.
For example, I can tag my clusters,
I can organize them into resource groups,
I can easily attribute the consumption of
different clusters into
different departments within my organization.
We know that Azure customers love Azure supports,
so I can click on "New Support Request"
right here and actually use Azure to
access self-help resources or
initiate a new support ticket for this cluster.
In a lot of ways, this looks and feels
like something that's running in the public Cloud,
even though in reality,
these servers are on my premises.
>> That's amazing it's a proxy resource manager.
I mean, Azure thinks of them as resources in Azure because they
are resources in Azure, they're just elsewhere.
>> Yeah, that's exactly right.
Essentially, you can think of it as that's
projecting what is sitting outside of Azure into Azure.
If that sounds familiar, it's because we've talked about
that a lot in the context of Azure Arc,
and one way to think about Azure Stack HCI is that it's
an HCI Stack from Azure that has arc built-in.
There's no agent, it just does this natively.
>> Wow and then the billing goes directly to
my Azure subscription because it's all part of Azure?
>> Absolutely. If you're one of
the 95 percent of the Fortune 500 who already use Azure,
this is extremely frictionless to get started.
>> Is it expensive?
>> It's a good question. No, actually,
and we'll talk about that in just a moment when
I give you a sneak peek into what's in this box here behind me.
There is a second thing I want to cover if I
may on the subject of frictionlessness.
This is the out-of-box experience
where it just shows up in the portal,
but there's also a ton of hybrid management services
in Azure that I can use with Azure Stack HCI.
It really makes it pretty easy for me to
start taking advantage of other capabilities that exist in Azure.
One of them, for example,
is replicating virtual machines.
Now, HCI is all about running virtual machines,
that's what you do on hyper-converged infrastructure.
How can you protect
those virtual machines without anything complicated to set up?
The answer is you can actually use Azure for that.
I'll give you a quick example of what I mean here.
Here's the user interface for Azure Stack HCI,
and I can see all of my virtual machines.
I can actually select one of them,
and you'll see there's all the standard actions
that I expect like Start,
Stop, but there's also
actions that are behind the scenes backed by the public Cloud.
For example, if I want to protect this VM,
behind the scenes, that's going to use Azure Site Recovery.
Now because it's Azure Stack HCI,
I'm already signed in,
it knows who I am, there's nothing
complicated that I need to jump around or set up.
I can just click "Protect",
and you can see here in the Azure portal,
this virtual machine is being protected,
it's being backed up to the Azure Cloud
really in a way that is completely native to the product.
There's nothing that I need to bolt together or build here,
it's an HCI stack that is hybrid by design,
by nature, if you will.
>> Wow, so that is just like I would protect any VM,
it's just that one happens to be local to me?
>> Exactly. You can use many of the same management services,
whether it's Azure Monitor or Azure Update Management.
The things that you use for virtual machines today in Azure,
you can use for these virtual machines even though
they're sitting on a cluster on your premises.
>> Wow. Azure Monitor was going to be one of my next question.
It's all part of Azure, because it's
all a resource within the Azure ARM family of resources.
>> Absolutely, and that's actually one of my favorites.
The extension to set up log analytics on top of
these Arc-enabled clusters is really easy actually.
>> Talk to me about the wooden box you've been teasing me with.
>> If you insist. What I have here is
a technology demonstration from one
of our partners for Azure Stack HCI.
Let me say first, it's not a commercially available product,
it is really a technology demonstration, but it's pretty cool,
it's some pretty groundbreaking hardware engineering
and that's why I wanted to share it with you.
What I have here is a spoke handcrafted wooden box,
and what's going on inside is it's actually
a fully self-contained battery powered Azure Stack HCI.
I can give you a sense for what some
of the components are that are inside here.
There's actually two servers within this wooden box,
each of them has the an AMD EPYC processor with two cores,
each of them has 64 gigs of DDR4 error-correcting memory,
each of them has for NVMe SSDs for super fast storage,
and they're directly connected to one another with
dual 10 gigabit crossover ethernet.
This is server class hardware,
but clearly it's unconventional form factor,
having everything in this little wooden box
is not what you would have
thought of initially when you think of HCI.
Normally you'd think of Rackmount servers in a data center,
but it doesn't have to be big and heavy and expensive,
it can be a wooden briefcase.
>> That's amazing. It makes me imagine like an Indiana Jones type
out at the dig site with
their Toughbook and they've got their laptop.
Now we brought all the compute to us,
but you're actually bringing a slice of the Cloud
itself out to the work site,
and you're doing the processing there,
whether it be AI or anything you could put into a virtual machine.
>> That's actually a great point you raise,
which is you can run anything you can put into
a virtual machine on top of an Azure Stack HCI.
Whether it's a Windows or Linux Virtual Machine,
you want to run IoT Edge,
or some custom line of business application,
or a high-performance SQL server.
Again, even just as wooden cluster is,
is actually all flash storage,
so it's very fast.
>> Wow.
>> What's great about it is these internals,
I mean this is the opposite of a rugged system,
because it's in crafted wood.
But you can get these internals from server vendors like
SecureGuard and others in
actually a proper ruggedized form factor,
and then it's perfect for putting in
retail stores, or field sites,
or branch offices, where things are
maybe not quite as
controlled an environment as they would be in a data center.
>> The retail stores one is a great example.
If you had a whole series of
stores and it all has a central Cloud,
you don't want the Cloud going down to ruin it for everybody,
so you take a slice of the Cloud,
you move it out to the edge,
and everyone does their work with their local Cloud there.
Their AI training of the shelves,
I mean all the things you could do if you had that compute,
that's on a laptop and a wooden box,
that's two server class systems in a wooden box.
>> Actually your example with retail is a
really good one to circle
back to something you brought up earlier,
which is the price point.
If you're a retailer and you have
hundreds or thousands of locations,
you're pretty sensitive to the per
location cost of each of these systems.
That's where I think it's important to emphasize that
Azure Stack HCI is actually not a device from Microsoft per se,
it's a software service from Microsoft that the customer
can install on whatever device they think is appropriate.
There are over 200 different server solutions
that have been validated for Azure Stack HCI,
each of these can be configured in a number of different ways.
You can get the entry price point for the minimum configuration,
down actually, really affordable.
This example that I have here is
single-digit thousands for the full self-contained system,
including those of the servers.
Then it doesn't have to break
the bank from the hardware perspective,
but it also doesn't have to break
the bank from the software perspective,
because the software for Azure Stack HCI is
just a flat rate per physical processor core of $10 per month.
For this system, for example,
this is one, two, three, four,
this is a 4-core Azure Stack HCI,
it's $40 a month.
You can imagine putting that
into all of the different locations for a retailer,
it's a much more appealing proposition than looking at
the upfront licensing from
what you would typically think of as HCI.
>> Wow, that's amazing.
That's one of the things I like about
doing a show like Azure Friday
is when someone is watching this show right now,
I'm hoping that they're going, "I had no idea that this was
a thing and now this is a thing that I want for my business,
for my company, for my whatever,"
and they're going to go and explore this and learn more about it.
>> Absolutely. If folks are interested in
getting hands-on with, well,
you can't have my wooden cluster,
but you can get hands-on with
Azure Stack HCI actually starting right now.
As of last week at Microsoft Inspire Azure Stack HCI
is in public preview,
you can go sign up and try it right now at Azure.com/HCI.
Or if you just want to hear more about the wooden box,
you can actually read the blog from our friends at SecureGuard at
aka.ms/cluster in a wooden box, ciwb.
>> Fantastic. I am learning all about
Azure Stack HCI today on Azure Friday.
>> Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Azure Friday.
Now I need you to like it, comment on it,
tell your friends, retweet it,
watch more Azure Friday.
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