>> Hello and welcome.
If you're watching this on-demand session,
it's probably because you heard
today's exciting news about
the next generation of Azure Stack HCI.
Azure Stack HCI is the easiest way for
existing customers and fans of Hyper-V and Windows Server to take
their first step into hybrid Cloud by modernizing how they run
virtual machines on-premises using hyperconverged infrastructure.
My name is Cosmos.
I work in the Azure team at Microsoft,
and for the next 30 minutes or so,
we're going to unpack today's announcements.
We'll dive into the details,
do a few demos,
and see what's new for Azure Stack HCI.
Before we dive in,
there are two pieces of
background that I'd like to provide really quickly.
The first is that Azure Stack HCI is
just the latest member in
the growing portfolio of Azure Stack products.
At Microsoft, we're committed to offering
a comprehensive and flexible lineup of edge infrastructure,
Cloud technology that you run on your premises.
This ranges from Azure Stack Hub,
self-contained API consistent Cloud appliance,
that's a little bit like having
your own Azure region in your datacenter,
all the way down to Azure Stack Edge,
a 1U compute server for
AI workloads on Microsoft's own first-party hardware.
You can learn more about
the whole Azure Stack family by going to Azure.com/AzureStack.
The second thing is that
this new Azure Stack HCI product takes its name
from a program that Microsoft has run for
several years using recent versions of Windows Server.
That program was really
popular and it's what inspired this new product.
I say this so that you're not
confused if you come across documentation
or other artifacts from years past that
refer to that program using the same name.
Sorry for the confusion.
If you're not familiar with that program, don't worry about it.
If you're an existing customer or a fan of that,
then I think you'll be particularly
excited by what we have to share today.
Without further ado, let's jump in.
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>> We can start from a simple question.
What is Azure Stack HCI?
Simply put, Azure Stack HCI is hyperconverged infrastructure.
In other words, it's software from
Azure that includes our latest hypervisor with
built-in software-defined storage and
networking and its software that
you install on your servers that you control on your premises.
This software is delivered as an Azure hybrid service,
meaning it's monitored, supported,
licensed, and build through Microsoft Azure.
If you already have an existing Azure subscription,
it's very easy to get started.
There's no traditional upfront
software license that you need to buy.
Critically important, Azure Stack HCI is
designed with the needs of IT front and center.
You can run the Azure Stack HCI on
your choice of hardware from your preferred vendor,
and you can continue to use the tools,
processes, and skills that you and your team already have.
Let's dive into each of these areas then.
[MUSIC]
>> We can start by talking about
the core hyperconverged infrastructure stack.
Hyperconverged infrastructure in recent years
has really become the normal way to deploy new servers,
whether it's in the core datacenter
or in a branch or remote office.
With HCI, you consolidate
a traditional three-tier architecture where you
have separate storage arrays and
hypervisor hosts and network appliances.
You consolidate that onto
just industry standards servers that have
extra local drives and extra high-speed networking.
The software-defined storage built into HCI converts
those extra local drives into
virtual data volumes that have
fault tolerance and all the other
features that you would hope for,
and software-defined networking creates virtual switches,
networks, load balancers, and gateways.
Really in many ways,
hyperconverged infrastructure is the next natural frontier
and wave of virtualization.
Some typical benefits of
Azure Stack HCI include maximizing performance.
For example, we have demonstrated over a million IOPS per server,
which StorageReview called the fastest they've seen,
as well as reducing costs by as much as a factor of many times.
For example, our customer,
the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,
said that if they had chosen SAN storage,
it would have cost four times more than Azure Stack HCI.
But beyond these typical advantages,
today's new Azure Stack HCI brings
new advancements to our core HCI Stack,
enabling scenarios and capabilities
that were never possible before.
For one, today Microsoft is releasing
a specialized new operating system
that's purpose-built for Azure Stack HCI.
When you install this product,
you'll see it looks and feels distinctly Azure.
It's our latest hypervisor with built-in storage and networking.
It has a reduced composition that's
optimized for virtualization and
a minimal local user interface because it's
designed from the ground up for remote management.
It also includes several exciting new features.
For one, it's now possible to stretch
an Azure Stack HCI cluster so that it spans multiple locations.
This can be multiple rooms,
multiple buildings, or
even multiple cities that are quite far apart.
The built-in synchronous or asynchronous storage replication
ensures that all your data is replicated from
one site to the other site so that
virtual machines can automatically
failover from one site to the other.
This provides business continuity that's very simple to set up.
In fact, let me show you with a quick demo.
When you provision an Azure Stack HCI cluster
through the Admin Center,
you can indicate that the cluster you're going to create uses
today's new Azure Stack HCI version 20H2.
When you do that, you'll be given
the option to specify whether the servers are
all in one site or spread across two sites.
If you choose spread across two sites,
later in the workflow you'll be given
the opportunity to define what those sites
are and indicate which of
the servers in the cluster are in which of the sites.
Then, from that point onward,
day to day when you provision
new storage or create new virtual machines,
you can indicate on
a volume-by-volume basis whether that volume should be
simply on one of the sites or
replicated from one site to the other.
If you choose replicated,
then you can select the replication direction
from Paris to London or from London to Paris,
as well as the replication mode,
whether it's synchronous or asynchronous,
and a number of other configuration choices.
This has been one of the most requested additions
to Storage Spaces Direct,
so we're thrilled to be shipping it.
Anything else that I think customers are really going to
love is that the new Azure Stack HCI
introduces a completely re-engineered mechanism
for storage spaces to prepare and resync data.
By tracking overwritten or dirty regions
at a very fine granularity,
1,000 times finer than in Windows Server,
the average duration of
a server resynchronization is reduced in the 50th percentile case,
the typical case, by a factor of almost four,
and in the worst case,
on the 99th percentile by a factor of almost five.
This is a game-changer that makes
applying updates and restarting servers much quicker.
Last but certainly not least,
soon customers from select vendors
like our good friends at Dell EMC,
will be able to get driver and firmware updates
delivered seamlessly as part of
the standard workflow to update an Azure Stack HCI.
This delivers integrated full-stack updates
with just a single click.
You can see here a screenshot of the working prototype snap-in
extension that's been co-engineered by Dell EMC and Microsoft.
We're really excited. We can't wait to get this into your hands.
That's just a few of the things that are new in
the core HCI Stack and Azure Stack HCI.
Let's switch now to talk about what it means to deliver
Azure Stack HCI as an Azure Hybrid Service.
We know from firsthand experience and from customers that hybrid
is too hard whether it's networking or identity or something else,
establishing and maintaining a connection between
servers that are on-premises
and at the public Cloud is challenging.
On the one hand, the advantages of Cloud-based monitoring and
Cloud-based security and having
the Cloud as a single control plane,
the advantages are clear.
On the other hand, there are good and durable reasons that
certain servers and certain workloads can't
move to the public Cloud whether that's latency,
or data sovereignty, or some other reason.
Azure Stack HCI is all about making it
easier to blend those advantages and get the best of both.
When you finish setting up an Azure Stack HCI,
it natively integrates with Azure and the Azure Resource Manager,
there's no separate agent that you need to install and maintain,
there's no complicated scripts that you need
to fuss with, it's very easy.
Azure Arc is built
natively into the Azure Stack HCI operating system,
so each on-premises cluster is
projected into the Azure portal into the context of
your Azure Active Directory as
a resource in a resource group in your subscription,
this means you can see it in the Azure portal, let me show you.
In my browser, I'm going to navigate to
portal.azure.com and this is
just a regular Azure portal on the public Internet,
so if you've used Azure before,
this should look very familiar
to you there's really nothing different.
What's new, what you haven't seen before is
this Azure Stack HCI Cloud Service,
this is projecting through
a new Azure Stack HCI resource provider all of
my On-Premises clusters directly into Azure for example,
I can select this first one,
Contoso HCI and here I get a view that
shows me information about that Azure Stack HCI cluster.
For example, I can see that it has two server nodes,
they're both Lenovo SE 350
and I can see other information that it's connected to Azure.
Over time, this experience will become even richer
and we'll present more information and more management options.
This custom resource benefits from many of
the standard benefits of an Azure resource so for example,
I can tag it with tags,
I can organize my clusters into resource groups,
and I can get a single global view
of all of my clusters right here in Azure.
Azure customers love Azure support,
so I'm really pleased to say that
the new Azure Stack HCI is covered by Azure support.
In fact, Microsoft is creating a new dedicated team staffed by
season veterans and subject matter experts
specifically to support Azure Stack HCI.
As a customer, you can submit a support request and
access self-help resources directly in the Azure portal,
it's never been easier,
and you can choose a plan that
suits your needs starting as low as just
$29 a month for developers or $100 a month for standard support.
This is really good news for smaller customers
for whom a premier contract just wasn't a realistic option.
Of course, if you have premier,
you're covered too, you can visit
Azure.com/Support for more information.
Despite running on your premises,
Azure Stack HCI is build to
your Azure subscription just like
any other Azure service that you use.
For the over 95 percent of fortune
500 companies and thousands more who use Azure already,
this means it's really frictionless to get started,
there's no traditional software license,
there's no hefty upfront cost for the software.
It's a simple cost structure that depends only on the number of
physical processor cores that you have and to be clear,
unlike most other HCI vendors,
you don't transact one version and then in
the future you've got to go buy the next version, rather,
it's an always up-to-date service that
keeps getting better through regular feature updates over time.
Guest operating systems and guest applications of course,
are licensed separately and you can
learn more at azure.com/pricing.
By the way, one thing I love is
how the pricing scales down to the edge,
there's no minimum or maximum cost,
this is really good news for small deployments and
honestly it opens up a whole new set of
opportunities that just haven't been possible before.
The addition of management and billing and support through
Azure compliments existing hybrid
capabilities that work even on Windows Server,
such as hybrid networking,
recovery and replication to the Cloud,
and using Azure policies to control hosts and VMs.
These additions that we're announcing
today are also just the beginning,
the Azure engineering team is hard at
work building even more features that will be coming soon,
including my personal favorite, VM self-service.
Let me give you just a little sneak peek.
Soon, you'll be able to delegate access to
other users within your Azure Active Directory so that
they can create and manage
their own virtual machines on top of your Azure Stack HCI cluster.
This effectively gives them a consistent toolset in
the Azure portal and the Azure CLI or command-line tools so
that they can create VMs on HCI just like they would do in
the public Cloud and it also
provides a lightly isolated concept of tenancy,
because these users to whom you delegate these permissions don't
actually have the ability to access
the underlying infrastructure and mess up the fabric.
I'm so excited for this and I know it's been
among the most requested features from customers too.
That's what we mean when we say that Azure Stack HCI is
delivered through Azure and really that it has Azure built-in.
Let's switch gears now and talk about what makes
Azure Stack HCI familiar for IT to manage and operate.
First and foremost, you can use Azure Stack HCI without
disrupting the established processes and
relationships that you have for procuring server hardware,
we know that this is critical.
You can deploy Azure Stack HCI on your choice of
over 200 server solutions from 20 plus partners so that
you can choose the partner that provides
the best selection and
support in your region and in your geography.
Just to give a sense for these numbers,
I want to show you the diversity
of solutions that are available in the catalog,
this is just a selection of the ones that are there,
you'll see they range from 1U, to, 2U,
to 4U, some of them are tower form factor, or rack form factor,
some of them have external direct attached storage in a J-Board,
it's really an immense amount of variety.
More than that, you can customize most of these solutions so that
they actually suit your needs over
and above simply choosing from the 200,
a solution is really a server system plus
a prescribed host bus adapter plus
a prescribed network adapter family
but you're free to configure the processor,
the memory, the storage,
and more subject to the vendors compatibility matrix.
This means there's not really 200,
there's more like almost infinitely many servers that you
can choose to run Azure Stack HCI.
Earlier we talked about Cloud-based management,
but what happens if your Azure Stack HCI
loses access to the Cloud temporarily, it's no problem.
In addition to the Azure portal,
Azure Stack HCI includes a rich set of
Edge local management tools that are always available.
In fact, in a pinch,
Azure Stack HCI can run for up to 30 days
completely disconnected from Azure
although, we don't recommend that.
Let me give you an example of
how the Edge local tools which are Admin Center,
work really in concert with the Cloud-based tools,
the Azure portal to provide
a complementary and comprehensive set of manageability tools.
I'm going to give you a demo now in which we
will do a scenario
that actually spans both of these sets of tools,
I'm going to start in Admin Center,
this is the Edge local tooling and you can see here I'm looking at
a list of all of the virtual machines
running on my Azure Stack HCI.
If I want with just a few clicks,
I can select one of them and choose to protect it by replicating
that VM in real time with
a very tight RPO up into the public Cloud,
this behind the scenes is taking advantage of Azure Site Recovery.
Because I'm logged in,
it knows who I am and there's really not much I have to specify.
Once it's protected, I can click that link
and you'll see suddenly I've switched from
the local tooling into
the Azure Portal and now I can see that that virtual machine,
accounting O2, is replicated up into
the Cloud and that replication
is healthy and this VM is protected.
Just in that quick scenario,
I seamlessly switched from one set of
tools into the Azure portal and you can see how they've really
worked together in concert with a consistent look and feel to
provide you with the manageability you
need wherever and whenever you need it.
Last but certainly not least,
we know how important and valuable it is for IT to be able to
standardize on tools and
processes that they can apply across their entire estate,
across all of the servers that they manage,
that's why we believe that to modernize and use Azure stack HCI,
you shouldn't need to change the way you operate,
you shouldn't need to throw out
the skills that your team already has.
Azure Stack HCI offers full compatible support with
Windows PowerShell meaning if you have
existing scripts or automation,
you can continue to use those,
if you have an existing investment in System Center coming soon,
you'll be able to use System Center Operations Manager
and System Center Virtual Machine Manager with Azure Stack HCI.
Even third party tools for things like
monitoring and backup will work with Azure Stack HCI.
For example, we're delighted to partner with Altaro,
one of the most popular and fast growing VM backup solutions
who have already thrown their support behind Azure stack HCI,
you can learn more about their award winning
products by visiting altaro.com.
The key point to the customer is that you are the administrator,
you're in control, and you get to
choose which tools make sense for you.
This has been a quick tour of what Azure Stack HCI
is and everything that's new in version 20H2,
I hope you found this content valuable
and I thank you for taking the time to watch.
If you're eager to get hands on with
Azure Stack HCI then I have good news for you,
it's available in preview today,
you can sign up and get started at Azure.com/HCI.
Today's preview is just the beginning
of an exciting new chapter for
Azure Stack HCI and for Edge and on-premises products from Azure.
Over the coming months and years,
Azure Stack HCI is going to keep getting better,
that's how subscription services work.
We hope you'll come along on this journey with us,
on behalf of the engineering team here in Redmond,
thank you and we look forward to hearing your feedback and
working with you to make Azure Stack HCI better for you.
Thank you and thanks for watching.
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