Coming up,
whether you're an enterprise or a service provider;
we're going to take a look at Azure Stack integrated systems.
The unique combination of optimized hardware software and services that
delivers Azure with Azure Stack
to your own data center.
And as you take on the role as you own cloud operator.
We'll explain the Azure Stack integrated systems approach
and demonstrate the end-to-end IT experience including,
planning the size of your system and setting yourself up for scale,
configuring the system with your hardware partner,
provisioning resources to your developers,
plus ongoing management and monitoring.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined today by Vijay Tewari from the Azure Stack engineering team, welcome.
Thanks for having me on the show!
So we've covered Azure Stack in past shows.
This really gives you a hybrid platform
so that you can use the same services, automation, tools and portal
as Azure public cloud.
But your apps are actually running on-premises in your own data centers.
One area we haven't really explored in detail is really how Azure Stack is delivered and integrated
within your own data center.
So I'm excited to see the direction that you're taking now with Azure Stack integrated systems.
But can you explain more about the approach that you're taking here?
Absolutely as you mentioned the premise of Azure Stack
is to bring the core attributes we run in the public cloud
of Azure into your data center.
For example, if you want to move to the cloud
and you're held back due to regulatory compliance or other technical or business reasons,
this opens up new options
for you to be able to move to the cloud yet operate Azure in your data center.
We deliver Azure Stack as a purposeful integrated systems
that combines software, services, and hardware.
And these are highly optimized systems that benefit from learning from the public cloud,
but the agility at scale to provide a pragmatic hybrid cloud solution to you.
And these can be obtained from our partners
like Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
And Cisco coming later this year.
And as with the cloud,
there are no upfront costs.
You only pay for the Azure services that you use.
And we also give you a full end-to-end support experience
shared between us and our partners.
Alright so let's make this real because if you're watching at home
I bet people are wondering what's the experience to get all stuff up and running in my own data center.
Sure so let's walk through what it means
to a day in the life of getting Azure Stack running in your data center.
The first step is to work with your hardware partner
to plan the size of your system
based on the needs of your apps and services.
Do you have guidance in terms of the size when I start planning
for my system the initial kind of roll out?
So you can decide upfront what is the size of your scale unit.
This is a group of servers that you can start with as small as 4.
And it can be as large as 12 servers.
Soon you'll be able to add capacity to a scale unit by adding more servers.
and then you'll be able to add regions.
Think of regions as a geographical area that you define
which you will be able to add to your Azure Stack instance.
And then you'll be able to add multiple scale units per region.
And as you can see just like Azure.
Azure Stack is architected for scale
and we are delivering incrementally in this area.
All right so let's put this in to context here.
What do I get for say a 12 server set of Azure Stack servers?
If you have a 12 server system
with the right CPUs, with the right amount of memory and the right amount of storage
you can get about 400 plus Azure D2 size VMs
with the right amount of resiliency.
Now a D2 size VM is two virtual CPUs and seven gigabytes of memory.
So as you can see
It's a pretty significant amount of capacity.
Plus it has redundancy built in.
But once I've determined the size of the system
what I do next so next?
Next you'll need to share your required configuration
so that the hardware partner can build a system that's operational in your environment.
By completing a deployment worksheet
with your information.
Such as Azure active directory, your network settings
and other information that's required for customizing system for your environment.
Okay so I've shared the specs out with my hardware partner.
How do I know the system is actually ready to go and is usable?
So our hardware partner ships the hardware to your data center
and along with it comes some engineers
who will then deploy and integrate the system into an environment.
They will then validate it to make sure it is operational in the environment
before they hand over the system to you.
Now Azure Stack is one system in your sea of other systems.
But it's not an island.
You can work with your system integrator to make sure you can connect
Azures Stack monitoring and identity subsystems
to your centralized systems.
Okay and once I've got all this stuff up and running
how do I start to provision services out to my customers, my developers in house
and really manage that with my organization?
Right so let's start by actually first looking at an Azure portal.
Now this is the Azure portal and as a tenant I'm consuming
resources from the Azure portal.
And this is the Azure Stack portal.
Now by virtue of the consistency between Azure and Azure stack,
you get the same functionality between Azure and Azure Stack.
Along with Azure Stack, we also ship an administrative portal
and that administrative portal allows you to manage services in your data center.
Azure Stack comes with a bunch of foundational services out-of-the-box.
Infrastructure as a service with compute, storage with blobs, tables and queues and networking.
And in your local gallery you can select the services
that you want to be able to expose.
You can actually go to Azure and you can select
services from Azure that you want to bring down into your data center
and bring them down and expose them to your developers from your local gallery.
You then need to go and set offers, plans and quotas
which is how you encapsulate the services
that you want to be able to provide to your developers.
And then you can set quotas as to how much
of the services they can actually consume from that particular offer and plan.
So you really are a cloud operator here now.
Once it's up and running your developers start to consume resources
How do I go about operating Azure Stack in general?
So as you can see this is the Azure Stack administrative portal
and this gives you the health of all your resources.
As you can see I happen to have one region
in this Azure Stack instance
and I'm seeing a warning.
Let's click on the alert and see what the alert is telling me.
So the alert is showing me that a physical disk
and its connectivity has been lost to that disk.
And if you look at the details of that alert,
it is clearly telling you a set of steps that you can take to remediate that alert.
It's asking you to recede the disk.
and if that doesn't work to reach out to your hardware partner to actually replace the disk.
Now by virtue of the resiliency that the system has,
the system is absolutely continuing to operate.
So that's one of the benefits that you get out of an integrated system for Azure Stack.
You said something interesting earlier.
You actually only paying for what you use
even though you've got capital and infrastructure in your own data center.
But how do I keep track of all the resources and things that people are consuming?
And ultimately, what I then as the IT department need to pay for?
So just like other Azure services, you could watch this consumption in the Azure portal
or use the API to get a sense of what is the consumption in your environment.
So how do we go about getting the alert that you're showing here
to actually appear in my other data center management operations tools?
So all our administrative tasks are actually available via an API
or a PowerShell.
That allows you to integrate this into your existing management tools in your data center
like Nagios or Systems Center Operations manager.
So here I'm actually showing an instance of operations manager
where I've imported the Azure Stack management back
and you can see the alerts from an Azure Stack instance
being surfaced into your operations manager environment.
So we've covered monitoring performance with hardware and the support there,
but what happens if there's a software bug or an issue that we have to report?
So it's a simple model.
So just like for the hardware from a software perspective,
if one of the core services is faulty you'll get an alert
in the environment and you'll be given a simple set of steps to be able to take to remediate that.
However if that doesn't work,
then you can actually go to the a short portal
and you can raise a new support request.
I'm actually here in the Azure portal
and as you can see I've selected my subscription
and I'm selecting Azure stack to be able to raise a new support ticket.
Now the support ticket is received by us in the back-end
and We'll triage it between us and the partners
and make sure that you get a seamless experience between us and the partner.
Okay makes sense and I think I saw earlier there was a software update that was pending.
How does that work given that we want keep that consistency between Azure Stack
and Azure public cloud?
As you can see here there is an alert which refers to the fact
that there is an update that's available for Azure Stack.
Our updates can contain security fixes.
They can contain fixes for issues that were found in the product,
or they can contain new capabilities.
And how does the actual software update process work?
Now since we have a well understood and defined architecture between us and the hardware partner,
we can orchestrate the application of the updates in a manner that ensures
there is minimal downtime for the workloads
and the services that are running on Azure Stack.
For example, when we are updating a host
we can drain all the virtual machines that are running on a particular physical host.
Update that host and then rehydrate this host
with the virtual machines that were moved
to a different machine while the system was being patched.
Makes sense, but how often do I expect updates to be rolling in
and is there a way I can defer them?
So our goal is to be able to ship updates as frequently as is acquired by the customer.
But as a customer you have the choice of being able to defer an update
for up to 6 months.
So let's switch gears a little bit to disaster recovery.
Since we're maintaining its consistency with Azure and Azure Stack,
can I use Azure Stack to be a DR solution for my Azure Stack instance?
Yes, you can actually fail over your virtual machines
from Azure Stack to Azure.
By setting up this relationship you can replicate virtual machines from Azure Stack to Azure.
And in the case of a failure of an Azure Stack instance
you can then spin up those workloads in Azure
and continue in the face of disaster.
It's great to see all the progress that you've made so far with Azure Stack, but what's next?
So there are three areas that you will see us delivering on soon.
The first is around expanding your Azure Stack infrastructure
So that for example you can have different regions
followed by multiple scale units as I had mentioned earlier.
Secondly we are working on more purpose-built monitoring and alerts,
and intend to integrate it with Azure log analytics and OMS.
Lastly, we will integrate the automation of firmware updates
into our patching and update framwork.
So thanks Vijay for taking us through all the different practicalities
of getting Azure Stack running in our data centers.
But where can people go to learn more?
You can learn more at the link below
and work with your hardware partner to start planning your Azure Stack integrated system.
This is really good stuff and also keep watching Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest technology updates across Microsoft.
That's all the time we have for this show.
Thanks for watching and good bye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics