Hyperconverged infrastructure is increasingly common,
and Windows Admin Center can help you easily deploy
many kinds of clusters,
including hyperconverged infrastructure.
Hi, there. I'm Jeff Woolsey, and this is one in a series of videos
that shows you what's new in Windows Admin Center.
Windows Admin Center allows you to streamline everyday tasks
and connect to Azure for hybrid scenarios.
In this video, Cosmos Darwin will show you
how to use Windows Admin Center to deploy
hyperconverged storage. This feature is currently under
active development and available in Preview
so you can try it early and share your feedback.
Let's get started.
Cosmos: Hyperconverged infrastructure is rapidly becoming
the normal way to deploy servers on premises.
And that means it needs to be approachable for everyone.
From Fortune 100s to small businesses.
That's why Azure Stack HCI is available
on over 150 solutions.
Whoever your preferred vendor of servers is,
we are working with them to build solutions for you,
because we know that infrastructure is never one-size-fits-all.
And to illustrate that point, I'd like to tell you about
one of the newer solutions that's very cool.
This is the Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 Edge Server.
Inside it's all server-grade parts. It's got an Intel Xeon processor,
DDR4 error correcting memory. It's got
dual 10 gigabit networking that's iWARP RDMA capable,
and from four to eight NVMe SSDs in each server.
If you've been following Storage Spaces Direct over the years,
then you'll recognize that this server is perfect
for hyperconverged infrastructure.
And it packs all of this into a form factor
that is so light and small that you could conceivably
put it in your carry-on, fly to Microsoft Ignite
and walk on stage with it in a shoulder bag,
and the audience might not even notice.
In fact, this is the SE350. This is the future
of edge computing. Compact, connected, rugged,
and running Azure Stack HCI.
And to deploy my very own hyperconverged infrastructure,
all I need is two of these. I don't even need a
high-speed switch, I can connect them
back-to-back using crossover cables.
Let me show you now just how easy this can be to set up.
We begin in Windows Admin Center version 1910.
You'll see at the top there's a new solution
called Cluster Creation. We can actually use this
to deploy all different kinds of clusters,
including a classic failover cluster,
but for this demonstration, we’ll choose
hyperconverged infrastructure.
You'll notice that the workflow takes the form of
sort of a multistage wizard, so it's going to guide me
through every step of the process. This first screen gives me
some prerequisites. Like I have to install Windows Server.
Fair enough. And next I'll put in the credentials
that I'm going to use to manage these machines.
There are my creds.
Now I'm going to point Windows Admin Center at each of the
servers that I want to use to create hyperconverged infrastructure.
In this case, I've named them edgehci-1 and edgehci-2.
Windows Admin Center goes out and finds them.
And you can see they're both running Windows Server 2019
and they're both SC350 Edge Servers.
At this point, if there were any Windows features that I needed
to install for hyperconverged infrastructure, I could do so
with one click. But in my case, they’re already installed
so the next step is networking.
As I mentioned, each of these Edge Servers has two
10 gigabit network adapters. And there's also a one gig
that I'm going to use for management. This is important
because it means Windows Admin Center will connect over
that adapter and I can safely reconfigure the other ones
without risk of losing connectivity.
On this screen, I can input all of the key properties
of the network adapters that are between these two servers,
like their IP address, I could provide a VLAN ID if I need to.
But in this case, everything looks right.
Next, it's time to create the Hyper-V virtual switch
on each of these servers.
This is actually a fairly sophisticated step
behind the scenes. But you'll see, it doesn't need
to be complicated. You do have access to all the advanced
options that are there. So you could turn off VMMQ or
change the load-balancing algorithm, if you felt so inclined.
But you don't need to because all the defaults are already set
to what Microsoft recommends. So I'll click Next,
and we’ll create the virtual switch on each server.
Next it's time to form the cluster.
Validating the cluster runs a comprehensive
suite of checks to make sure that these servers are
suitable for clustering.
In this case, you'll see that they are.
I set it up so that we get a warning
just so that I can show you.
You can download a full report of everything that we checked.
You can also just browse its contents directly here in the browser.
So you'll see the warning I got is that there's an
update that I could apply. But for this demo that's fine,
I can continue.
I'll give the cluster a name like azure-stack-hci.
And then I'm ready to create the cluster.
This will go out. It will enable the cluster service
on each of the machines. It will form them into one
Windows Server cluster, and when that's done,
all I have is the final stage, to enable storage.
As I mentioned, you'll see each of these two Edge Servers
is packed with four NVMe SSDs. You can actually add
four more as well. This is perfect for Storage Spaces Direct.
At this stage, I could clean them if I needed to.
This is helpful if you are deploying over and over again
on the same hardware. But in my case, it's a new system
so I don't need to do that.
And all that's left then is to enable Storage Spaces Direct.
I'll click and you'll see this takes a moment because it's
doing actually quite a lot behind the scenes. It's taking
those NVMe SSDs from each server,
combining them into one software-defined pool
of virtually shared storage. But once it's done, that's it.
I've deployed my very own hyperconverged infrastructure
using these two Edge Servers in just
a couple of clicks and a couple of minutes.
What do you think?
[applause]
I am really proud on behalf of both
Microsoft and Lenovo
to announce that this entire solution you just saw,
all the innovative hardware, the software, the services,
everything you need for an Azure Stack HCI,
starts at just $20,000.
We know that for branch office and edge, the per-location
price point is really critical, so we're really proud of that.
You can find the SC350 and over 150 other solutions at
microsoft.com/HCI, and you can preview the deployment workflow
that I just showed. The documentation is at aka.ms/deploy-HCI.