(gears revving)
- Welcome to a special edition of Microsoft Mechanics,
where we're joined by Azure CVP Julia White,
to look at how you can enable seamless management
across your hybrid and multi-cloud environments
and tap into Azure services locally
by taking advantage of the latest updates to Azure Arc
and the newly refactored Azure Stack HCI.
Julia, thanks for joining us from your home in Seattle
and welcome back to Microsoft Mechanics.
- It is great to be back.
- So, it's an interesting moment in time
that we find ourselves in today,
where both users and IT are often working remotely.
For IT Teams that brings about additional challenges.
They need to deal with higher
and varying user demand for services
as more people work away from the office.
In addition to the increased complexities
of operating and managing an often diverse
IT estate spanning their own data centers
and across multiple clouds.
- And yeah, it really is unprecedented.
And in response, we're seeing a lot of organizations
accelerating their Cloud use to meet these demands,
like quickly scaling up and down,
simplified management and higher levels of security.
- But as they do that,
hybrid continues to be the common approach,
but increasingly managing multi-cloud environments as well.
- Right, now Azure's always been hybrid by design.
And starting about a year ago,
we took that hybrid expertise and extended it
to enabling multi-cloud and multi-edge capabilities as well.
So, now as you look at
Azure hybrid capabilities holistically,
we give you that seamless approach
to running and managing your applications across on prem,
multi-cloud and at the edge.
Specifically, now with Azure Arc
you have a consistent control plane
for all of your resources wherever they reside.
With Azure Arc enabled services,
you can deploy Azure fully managed services anywhere,
on prem and on other clouds.
For example, Azure SQL managed database
can literally be run anywhere.
And with Azure Stack portfolio,
you can bring Azure consistent infrastructure
directly into your data centers
and even run it on existing certified hardware
with Azure Stack HCI.
And we also know that increasingly new applications
being built include running some aspects at the edge.
So we've brought in our comprehensive Azure IoT portfolio,
such that there's consistency for the developer
as well as the management and security experience,
all the way to the gateway
or those tiny MCU devices like Azure Sphere.
- Awesome, so this takes hybrid to the next level.
And you can take advantage of Azure on your terms
and truly innovate anywhere.
Now, Azure Arc was the big announcement last Ignite
and before we get into the updates,
can you give us some examples of what you can do
with Azure Arc from a management perspective?
- Yeah, so Azure Arc really is that single control plane.
We help you bring all of your servers, VMs,
Kubernetes clusters and containers under central management,
so that you can take control of your infrastructure sprawl
and reduce governance complexity.
- And this is what most people
are interested in doing today.
- Right, and if you're running Kubernetes
in your environment,
that provides a Cloud native, cross-platform infrastructure.
And Azure Arc enables you to do two key things.
First, the ability to consistently deploy
and manage your Kubernetes-based applications anywhere,
at scale using your favorite DevOps approach.
And secondly, we've done the work to Arc enable
many of our PaaS services,
so you can deploy and manage Azure services
like our data services literally anywhere.
Customers have been super enthusiastic
about this capability
because data often either needs to reside on prem
or it needs to be standardized across all environments.
With the ability for Azure data services to run anywhere,
you have the best of both worlds.
You can have that fully managed, always up to date database,
and have complete control of where it's running.
- And this brings about as you say,
a lot more consistency and a lot less complexity.
So can you show us the tech in action
and the latest updates?
- Yeah, sure. Let me show you.
There's been a ton of momentum.
First at the foundational level,
we've shipped Azure Arc enabled servers
to provide that seamless management
for servers running in any environment.
Now as you can see here, represented by the blue discs,
this all brings your Windows or Linux servers
under policy management, wherever they are.
I can ensure that all my servers
have the right policies and configurations applied.
I'll click into this DevTest Server on AWS
and view its compliance with my policies.
And you'll see a holistic view of compliance
and a few of these policies with the purple icons
are even provisioning management extensions or agents.
So beyond just monitoring
I can also send configurations like these extensions down
to any server I've scoped for policy.
And this is also great for Azure managed service partners
who are managing multiple customers
using Azure Lighthouse along with Azure Arc.
Here, I'll click into a customer,
you'll see all the resources I've been delegated.
I'll choose Tailwind Traders.
And now I not only can manage what I need to in Azure,
but with Azure Arc, I can manage on-premises
or cross-cloud resources, like these VMs you see here.
So this opens up new possibilities
for managed service partners
who need to keep highly distributed resources
and services running across all of their customers.
- And we just showed recently on Microsoft Mechanics
how we can bring SQL servers that may be residing
on servers in your environment under management
with Azure Arc enabled SQL Server.
- Right, this is currently in public preview.
If I drill in here,
I can see the details about the SQL server.
It shows the version and edition
which helps me inventory all of my SQL Servers
regardless of where they're located.
If I click here on Environment Health,
you can now also use our SQL Assessment service
which analyzes your SQL Server
and makes best practice configuration recommendations.
- And you mentioned that the big promise of Azure Arc
is to deliver Azure services anywhere.
- That's right and we've started
with Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes,
that's now in public preview.
And here you're seeing Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes.
This brings consistent management
to all of your Kubernetes clusters wherever they are.
In fact, here we have clusters
in three on-premises data centers,
one in AWS, but it could be in any cloud,
and one on Azure Stack HCI, and one more in Azure.
- And this is really great momentum on Azure Arc
but as we bring our cloud to the edge,
the Azure Stack portfolio
has also received quite a few updates.
- Right, we're seeing customers increasingly
put AI on the edge, running on devices sitting
in the physical world to enable several new use cases.
We now have a GPU-enabled Azure Stack Edge device
which is perfect for local video inferencing.
In fact, RXR Realty are using these capabilities
to run our new Custom Vision and Spatial Analysis models
on data from their security cameras
to ensure that social distancing is happening
within their buildings.
But beyond Azure Stack Edge,
we also have a lot of updates to Azure Stack HCI
for hyper-converged infrastructure.
First Azure Stack HCI has been completely refactored
into a purpose-built OS for virtualization.
It includes the latest hypervisor,
with built in software defined storage and networking
and it's designed for scale and performance.
We've demonstrated as much as 1 million IOPS per server.
It includes built-in disaster recovery
with stretch clustering that allows your cluster
to be spread across separate geographical location.
You have the flexibility to deploy on hardware
from your choice of vendor,
either by purchasing a new integrated system
with the software preinstalled
or reusing suitable existing hardware that you already have.
You only pay per core.
Your payment is part of your existing Azure subscription.
So it really is an extension of your Azure capabilities.
And best of all, it's also integrated with Azure Arc
for remote monitoring and management.
- And one thing to stress here
is you only pay per call monthly
which means there's no upfront license cost.
And as a subscription service,
you're always kept up to date.
Okay, so we've brought people up to date with Azure Arc
and Azure Stack with some major updates to Azure Stack HCI.
Let's show everyone how they can start to come together.
And I'll start by deploying an Azure Stack HCI cluster
and then Julia, you can show management in Azure Arc
and how easy it is to add Azure services.
- Great, let's do it!
- [Matt] Now, the first thing I want to show you
is just how easy we've made it to deploy an HCI cluster.
So what we have on our screen here is one of the nodes,
running Azure Stack HCI,
which I deployed using my regular deployment methods.
And I've done a few things ahead of time
such as joined the domain,
configure a few basic network settings,
but where the real magic happens is in Windows Admin Center,
specifically in the new cluster creation wizard
for Azure Stack HCI,
which hugely simplifies the setup process
for both local clusters but also the new Stretch Clusters,
which as we said are unique to Azure Stack HCI.
So let's kick off the process,
and I'm going to show you how easy it is
to deploy a local cluster in this case, so we'll go next.
Now I've already added the two servers ahead of time,
and that domain joined in this case.
And Admin Center can automate
installing the required features on each node,
which is really useful.
It's also going to ensure that our systems are up to date.
And if needed, it'll also reboot the systems
ahead of the next step which is networking.
Firstly, Admin Center is going to detect our network cards,
then it's going to ask us
to dedicate one or two NICs for management,
so we'll make a selection on each node,
and then we'll apply and test those changes,
and wait a moment, and all good.
Next, we'll configure the rest of our network adapters
with names, addresses, subnet masks and VLAN IDs,
and then we'll apply and test those changes.
And as you can see, that's all working great.
We'll finally define a vSwitch
which will allow our VMs to communicate out on those hosts.
So we'll make a selection, we'll apply and test,
we'll wait a few moments, and all good.
We're then at this point,
we can validate the cluster configuration
to ensure that we have an optimal setup,
and we catch any errors or misconfigurations
before the cluster is created.
And that itself just takes a few moments.
And once validated, we can view the validation report
and then move on to create a cluster.
We'll provide a name and under advanced
I'm going to specify a static IP address
for communication and ongoing management.
And we can then create the cluster, which again,
takes just a few moments.
And behind the scenes,
Admin Center is orchestrating the whole setup
which makes things really easy.
And once created, we can finalize the storage
by first cleaning the drives in each of our nodes.
We'll verify everything,
validate the storage to ensure it's ready
for our software defined storage technology,
Storage Spaces Direct.
And once complete,
we'll enable that to complete the process.
Turning on the relevant health providers,
services, and configuring the cluster
to support Storage Spaces Direct.
And that's it, cluster created!
And from here, all you need to do is quickly register this
and it should show up in your Azure Portal.
- Awesome, that was actually straight forward.
Let's have a look at the experience within the Azure Portal.
So I'll open up the Azure Stack HCI blade in the portal,
and I can see our Azure Stack HCI cluster here
that is now Azure Arc enabled for management.
And I can see it's connected and information
about the two nodes in our cluster.
- And the good news is here
is we're working on bringing centralized health monitoring,
alerting and update management
to this experience soon too, which is awesome.
- Yeah, so now you have a way
to host your VMs on Azure Stack HCI,
but to light up more Azure Arc capabilities,
let's deploy Kubernetes.
We've just announced the preview
of Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI,
which automates the deployment
of the Kubernetes infrastructure.
This opens up opportunities to do several things
such as container-based way
of scaling elastically on demand.
And by the way, this is one of the mechanisms
we used at Microsoft to respond
to increased service demand around COVID.
Now also, as I mentioned, adding Kubernetes allows you
to deploy Azure services
such as Azure Arc enabled data services
directly on to Azure Stack HCI.
- Right, and deploying Kubernetes on-premises
in the past hasn't always been the easiest process.
So let me also show you how simple it is
to deploy AKS on HCI so that you can take advantage of it.
So I'm going to go back to the Windows Admin Center
to start this two part process.
And on the screen we have the Azure Stack HCI cluster
we've deployed previously.
And in the bottom left here,
you can see an Admin Center Extension
for the Azure Kubernetes Service.
Now remember, this is in preview, so it's subject to change.
But for this first part of this process,
we're going to deploy our Kubernetes
management infrastructure onto this HCI cluster.
So we'll review the pre-reqs
and then we'll move on to check our HCI cluster.
It's going to validate my creds,
then review the admin center and HCI cluster settings.
And as you can see, it'll make a couple of changes,
including adding any necessary firewall changes,
roles and features, any other adjustments.
Next is the host configuration
where we'll name our management cluster,
choose where we'll store our VMs for this cluster,
and define a few of the network settings,
including the low balancer if required.
We'll provide some Azure connectivity info
and I'm going to choose to send diagnostic info
to improve the product so that we can enhance it
as we go forward, and we'll review, and create.
And that's going to go ahead
and download all the necessary components
and deploy a management infrastructure onto our HCI cluster.
Now that's going to take a few minutes,
and so cooking show style,
I'll go to one I completed earlier.
So with that process completed,
we can now start this second wizard,
which will deploy the Kubernetes cluster
that will ultimately run our workloads.
Now what's nice about this wizard is the series
of steps matches those steps
for deploying AKS clusters in Azure.
So great usability consistency there.
So provide the basic info,
we're going to integrate with Azure Arc
by providing a subscription and a resource group.
Then we'll provide info about our target HCI environment,
along with credentials and some VM sizing info
for the primary node pool,
which runs some key system services.
We'll then define some worker node pools,
which will run our apps.
And I'm creating two pools,
one for Linux and one for Windows, each with two nodes.
And I can define the sizes of those VMs too.
I can configure some network settings,
including load balancing,
define persistent storage for our environment.
And finally, I review my settings and click create.
And within a few minutes,
we'll have our Kubernetes cluster created,
and integrated with Azure Arc.
So you should see it then in your Azure portal
alongside your other Kubernetes clusters.
- Great, and this really abstracts a lot of that complexity
and makes it easy to deploy Kubernetes on-prem,
on top of Azure Stack HCI.
So with those pieces in place,
we're ready to deploy Azure Arc enabled data services.
Data services provide self-service provisioning
of Azure SQL and PostgreSQL Hyperscale,
and will then manage those database instances
with built in monitoring, backup/restore, HA, and more.
Now as I mentioned before,
you're still in your local data center
and your apps can still connect like they always have,
but you have a fully-managed data services platform.
So let's go through the Azure Portal experience
of deploying Azure Arc enabled data services
from the Marketplace.
Starting here in the Marketplace,
I'll click on Create for an Azure Arc data controller.
I'll read up here on the prerequisites
and click Data Controller Details.
And here I'll provide the Azure subscription,
resource group, and the Azure location as usual.
Then I'll provide a name for the data controller
and select AKS deployment profile
and click Open in Azure Data Studio.
Here, you can see that the Azure Portal
has automatically created a Notebook
which I can download and run in Azure Data Studio.
From here, I can click Run All at the top
and kick off the Notebook,
which will deploy an Azure Arc data controller
to my Kubernetes cluster.
Once we've deployed Azure data services,
there are a variety of ways to deploy Azure SQL
or Postgres Hyperscale servers.
Anybody with the right permissions
can deploy a database instance from Azure Data Studio
in seconds using this wizard.
And as new features are added to Azure SQL,
I'll get the latest features
and updates automatically and right away.
My application developers won't need to wait
for the DBA team to upgrade to the next version
of SQL Server to get all the latest and greatest.
- And while we showed how Azure Arc enabled data services
can run on any infrastructure
on any community environment before,
this is a bit different.
- Right, what's different now
versus what you might've seen before
is that we're running on an end-to-end stack
that is fully provided and supported by Microsoft.
The virtualization layer is Azure Stack HCI,
and all the Kubernetes nodes,
which can be Windows or Linux VMs,
are supported by Microsoft.
So we give you the complete stack,
including the data services
and the other Azure Arc enabled services
that you can run on certified hardware in your data center.
- And we've really just scratched the surface here
on what's possible across multi-cloud
and multi-edge scenarios.
But where can people go and learn more?
- Well, you can always go to azure.com
to learn more about Azure Stack and Azure Arc
and get access to the latest previews of everything.
And we've also got lots of hands on tutorials,
so you can kind of fast track your learning path
so you can check those out as well.
- Awesome, thanks again Julia for joining us today.
That's all we have time for today
and we hope we managed to answer your questions
on the topic.
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