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good afternoon oh yeah there we go people are awake after lunch excellent
so coming up on here thank you for joining us and coming up on the show
whether you're an enterprise or a service provider we're gonna take a look
at Azure Stack integrated systems a combination of optimized hardware
software and services the delivers Azure with Azure Stack to your data center
and if you take on the role of the cloud operator will explain the azure stack
integrated systems approach and demonstrate the end-to-end IT experience
including planning and the size of your system and scaling configuring your
system with a hardware partner provisioning resources to your
developers plus ongoing management and monitoring so today I'm very pleased to
be joined by the one and only mr. Jeffrey Snover, a technical fellow, give
it up for Jeffrey so we've covered as you're stuck in past shows and it gives
a hybrid platform that you can use the same services automation tools and
portals Azure for your apps but running on prem within your own data centers now
before we explore before we explore how azure stacks delivered specifically
and integrate it with your data center help us understand some of the rationale
behind the integrated systems approach azure stack yeah absolutely as you
mentioned the premise of azure stack is to bring the core attributes of how we
run the public cloud with Azure into your data center for example if you want
to move to the cloud but maybe held back due to regulatory compliance or technical
other business or technical reasons this opens up new options to move to the
cloud while allowing you to operate Azure in your data centers so we built
Azure stack as a purpose-built integrated system it combines hardware
software and services these are highly optimized systems a benefit from our
learning of the running the public cloud with the agility and scale to provide a
very pragmatic hybrid cloud solution and these can be obtained by our hardware
partners starting right so you can get them from Cisco,
Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Huawei coming in early calendar year 2018 so people can
order them now I'm this telling shipping exactly excellent as with Azure there no
upfront software costs you only pay for the azure services that you use and
would give you full end and support with our hardware partners so how do roles
change when IT organizations start to implement and use such a stack yeah
exactly rules do change right so there are new set of roles using the cloud and
Azure Stack first is there's the cloud architect right now the cloud architect
is gonna be the person that determines how your integrate as your stack into
existing systems and they'll help determine the sizing that's right for
that company next is the azure stack operator the azure stack operator is the
guy who runs it day-to-day he'll on board tenants he'll monitor things
day-to-day and then lastly is the DevOps teams themselves the DevOps teams will
be composed of mixtures of infrastructure engineers and development
engineers and those are the three roles so we see IT admins willing to embrace
the cloud and start introducing DevOps within the environment as well which is
a great way to efficiently develop software in the environments all
benefits azure stack. yep so let's make this real for people watching.
what's the experience like for integrating azure stack into a data
center? right so let's start by walking through a day in the life of a getting
Azure Stack running into your data center the first step will be the cloud
architect planning with the hard work you know working with the hardware
partner to plan the size of the system based upon the needs of the applications
and services used by that organization and I'm guessing we have a little bit of
guidance and plan it to help people plan the size of their system yeah exactly so
you decide upfront the size of your scale unit this can be a group of
servers that can start off that can be as small as four servers or as large as
12 soon we'll be able to add capacity to the scale units by adding more servers
then you'll be able to add regions there you go then be able to add regions and
you should think of a region as a geographical area that you will define
to 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 see azure stack is architected for
scale and will be delivering incrementally in this area unless we go
forward it really is going to deliver on a global level to meet your needs within
your environment exactly which is awesome so to put this in context how much
capacity does a scale unit get right so if you have a 12 server system and with
the right configuration you'll be able to run about 400 Azure D2 size VM but
these have two virtual CPUs and 7
gigabytes of memory per VM and they have resiliency and
redundancy built in that's a pretty large infrastructure so yeah once you
determine the size of the system that you think you're gonna need what's next
right ok so next what you're gonna do is your cloud architect will then you know
will need to share the configuration right the acquired configuration with
the hardware partner so they can that you'll share it with them and the
hardware partner will build an operational environment for you ok so
here's a deployment spreadsheet has all the information it's got as your active
directory information it's got the network settings for storage and
infrastructure networks and everything else required for customizing the system
for your environment so I work with my teams I fill out this spreadsheet I get
all the necessary information and then once I've shared these specs yeah how do
you make sure that the system's ready for my specific environment right so our
hardware partners ship the hardware to your location and their engineers will
deploy it and integrate the system on-site and they'll validate it to
ensure that it's operational in your environment as your stack becomes one of
the systems in your data center but it's not an island ok your cloud architect
will design the integration of Azure Stack with your centralized monitoring
and identity systems right so it's been shipped it's open running in my
environment how do azure stack operators go about
provisioning resources for my users, my DevOps engineers, whoever they may be
within my organization. Great, so this is the Azure public cloud portal you all
have seen it we all love it ok here is the azure stack portal looks very
familiar you'll notice it's exactly the same thing
except it says as your stack instead of just Azure ok so now let me show you the
azure stack operator portal notice the different color (for the demo) ok the azure stack
operator first needs to determine the services that their team's their DevOps
teams are going to need as your stack comes with the number of these
foundational services out of the box so I as our compute storage so that's blob
table queue and networking okay but here go in the local gallery you can select
the ones that you want directly from Azure
so we've syndicated the gallery with Azure and here you see the Linux and other VMs
and other solutions available from Azure as lots of stuff there as well virtual
machines extensions and the list is growing all the time from our great
partners who have larger solutions today bringing them to Azure Stack which is
awesome so how do we make these services that we choose to add how do we make
them available to our end users great so basically what's gonna happen is the
azure stack operator will build these things called offers and plans ok so
we'll come here and you see tenant offers and plans so they'll define these
offers and plans these encapsulate the services that they'll provide to their
individual DevOps teams this is also where you'll set the quotas so they can
determine how much their teams can actually consume also the plan
determines what kind of resources you can access the offer makes it available
to people and then the quota determines how much of that they can use exactly
awesome so when we think about operating Azure Stack tell us a bit about more
about when we consume resource how do we ensure that we're monitoring and
maintaining and controlling them yeah great
so that's where our operator comes in okay we'll give you full visibility into
the health of your resources all right a warning alert that ya will drill into
this alert so notice as we drill into this alert it's warning us about a disk
that has failed but the system has resiliency so it continues to work and
down here at the right bottom right you see there's a remediation this action
articulates this alert articulates the actions you need to take here it's
telling us to try and re-seat the disk and if that doesn't work to call the
hardware partner to have it replaced now with a sure and obviously now with
azure stack you pay for what you use but how do we keep track of the the
resources that are our users are actually consuming that we ultimately
need to pay for yeah so just like any other as your service you can view this
in the azure portal so the alert you mentioned before it popped for a disk
error in particular how do I get that to appear in my existing data center
operations tools I might be using great all of our administrative tasks are
available via API and the marvelous PowerShell okay this allows you to
integrate Azure Stack into your data center operations tools such as Nagios
or a System Center Operations Manager we even have an Azure Stack management pack
with that ships with System Center Operations Manager as you can see here
the operation this is the Operations Manager console view and it's showing me
the alerts from my Azure Stack instance boom so that covers monitoring hardware
performance and support but what happens in the case of a software related issue
Azure Stack specifically right yeah so it's very simple
for example if one of our core services is not operating as you'd expect due to
a flaw and needs customer support to interviewing the operator gets an alert
they can then raise a support ticket with the hardware vendor or directly
with us using the azure portal the operator can then reach out to Microsoft
or the hardware vendor and we'll work out together how we'll
work together to make sure your issue is resolved Now
so I noticed before back in the portal there was a there was an update tile
yes how do updates work given that it's very important that we keep consistency
in Azure Stack with Azure yep okay so here's that update tile you were
referring to it's indicating that we have an update available updates can
contain security updates or fixes to issues that we found or new capabilities
so how does it work can you walk us through it yep okay so since we have a
well-architected and well-understood architecture will orchestrate these
updates in a way that ensures minimal downtime for the tenant workloads so for
instance when updating a host will drain all the VMs for that host to another
system while we update that host so we ensure no interruption to the workloads
or anything minimal. A minimal interruption if there is still a
maintenance window okay cool so how frequently do updates roll in and can I
defer them yes so our goal is to be able to ship updates on a monthly basis now
as an operator you'll have the choice of when to take the update and you'll be
able to defer the update for up to three months okay so what about disaster
recovery is it possible for me to fail over my workloads into Azure if
something happens to my datacenter yeah you'll be able to fail over or backup to
Azure via as your site recovery or as your backup and as your backup so lots
of cool stuff there really exciting stuff when it goes along it's great and
now that it's shipping it's even better but what's next in the plan okay great
so there will be three areas that we're you'll see us deliver on right so the
first is we'll continue to expand the scale of Azure Stack, second will add
more options for monitoring and alerting and last we're gonna integrate the
automation of firmware updates via patch and update. Some excellent cool stuff
well thanks Jeffrey for taking us through the practicalities of getting
Azure Stack working in your data center where can people learn more great
so we have a you can learn more links shown somewhere here and you can work
with your hardware partner to order systems today we're shown in the expo
floor go check come out they're fantastic. OK some great
stoof and keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest on Microsoft
thanks! thanks for watching
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