Since the Azure Stack Architecture blog became rather long, this blog will cover the second part. You can find part one here. Initial Azure Stack VM sizes In Azure Stack TP2 there are only a handful VM sizes, but at GA a lot more VM sizes will be supported, although not all VM sizes can […]
Hall C1 can take 2,000 people and every one of them was present for Spencer Shepler’s Dive into Microsoft Azure Stack Architecture session. Azure Stack Integrated Systems First picture Spencer showed was of the three Azure Stack integrated systems by HPE, Dell EMC and Lenovo. A must see on the booth of Ignite 2016. Timelines A […]
My first session on day 3 of Ignite was Vijay Tewari, Group Product Manager of Azure Stack. An excellent overview was given on how to operate and manage an Azure Stack environment, showing how this works at a much smaller scale than public Azure. Clusters in Azure are not based on Failover Clustering but are close to 1000 nodes in size. So management and operations at the much smaller scale of Azure Stack requires some adaptation.
In Azure, Microsoft is the cloud provider, offering services to tenants and has a large number of engineers to operate that cloud. In Azure Stack this is exactly the opposite because the service provider/enterprise is the cloud provider, and is responsible for the infrastructure. The customers of Azure Stack are your tenants who consume the services that you are offering.
Microsoft looked at System Center, as well as the tools that are currently used in Azure. Microsoft decided that the tools in Azure were preferred because that is how MS operates their cloud. It would have been difficult to mold System Center to manage Azure Stack. Nevertheless, Microsoft has taken learnings from both sides, Azure and System Center.
Microsoft gained a lot of insight in industry trends and with Windows Server 2016 they built great technology which follows along those trends. Microsoft decided to choose hyper-converged with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) over converged with SOFS for Azure Stack. Combining storage and hypervisor is now supported in Windows Server 2016. (more…)
The second day of Ignite 2016 was a very interesting one and quite diverse. I had selected several sessions on Azure Stack but also Software Defined Networking and Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V. I started with Explore Microsoft Azure Stack “State of the Union” – Foundation 1 by Natalia Mackevicius and ‘actors’ Rupi Sureshkumar and Shriram […]