Tag Archives: Management

Azure Stack Infrastructure Operations and Management

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.

Cloud Operating Model

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.

cloud-operating-model

Key design decisions

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.

design-decisions

Hyper-converged or Converged?

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…)

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