After a long wait finally we can get our hands dirty on the next technical preview (TP2) of Microsoft Azure Stack. This technical preview is, like TP1, still a single node installation. They have made a lot of enhancements to the deployment experience. Especially when you want to redeploy the same host multiple times. For example, the Storage Pools is cleaned when you reinstall your host. They create the deployment idempotent. That means if for whatever kind of reason the deployment failed you just need to restart the deployment with the parameter -rerun (InstallAzureStack.ps -rerun). And off course… with TP2 some new features are enabled in Azure Stack. Those features are:

• iDNS
• Key Vault
• Improved portal experience
• Virtual networking improvements (Gateway, UDR)
• Storage Queues

In the context for the Service Administrator you will notice that they have enhanced the portal with some new icons and functions (not all are working in this release).

Once you have downloaded the TP2 bits you need to boot from a pre-packaged VHDX to get started. I have added the CloudBuilder.vhdx image to our WDS server in our lab and used a custom deployment boot image to directly deploy the VHDX to the Hyper-V host. This Cloudbuilder.vhdx is contained in the 20GB installer of Azure Stack.

Once the deployment is finished it will reboot and an OOBE will appear on my screen.

Now it’s actually pretty straight forward to kick the tires with TP2.

If you prefer you can rename the host, reboot again, but you actually only have to disable all NIC’s except the 1 connected to your network. If you have DHCP on that network, it’s just a matter of copy this script to your host (edit the values to match yours)

and approximately 2 – 2,5 hours later you will have this:

Happy Stacking!