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Introducing the all-new azure stack HCI sizing tool (preview)!

yasmeen_jassim's avatar
Jan 07, 2022

As Azure Stack HCI has grown, we have been working on ways to help you have an enjoyable, straight forward experience. Our new web-based, customer driven sizing tool is among the suite of tools we have created to supplement existing documentation about Azure Stack HCI. The motivation for creating this tool purely stems from our customers – you said you needed help with sizing, and we listened. Leave the heavy lifting to us - tell us your needs and we’ll suggest what to purchase.

 

 

 

Sizing is an ongoing process

 

When creating the tool, we heavily relied on our customers – we did research, made customer calls, and used several conferences to help us decide how to build the tool. We discovered that sizing is an ongoing, continuous process and we wanted to make sure that our tool reflected that. When you launch the sizer, you are immediately taken to the sign-up page. Creating an account is quick, easy, and free – it allows you to save your work and come back to it later.

 

 

Sizing projects

 

Your business may have several projects that all have different requirements. The sizer allows you to create multiple projects, thus reflecting your various business needs. You can create as many projects as you want, and each project can be edited or deleted. Environmental inputs and workloads in each project can be different and you can make changes at any stage of sizing.

 

 

 

Environmental preferences

 

Step 1 of the sizer asks you for preferences that will stay consistent across your project. Preferred system type, CPU family and solution builder help us filter through hardware that fulfills your preferences. Your organization may have an existing relationship or preference for a specific OEM, and we ensure to account for that by asking upfront. Your high availability scenario tells us whether you would like us to account for cases where 1 or 2 nodes may be down, thus ensuring that our hardware suggestion can keep your workloads running in emergency cases. Input fields like storage failures to tolerate and resiliency preferences help us account for best practices in storage spaces direct. We also give you the option to plan for future growth by telling us what percentage of your hardware you would like to reserve for future growth scenarios and whether you’d like to keep some bays empty for future memory and storage expandability. We also allow you to choose Software Defined Networking and specify the number of VMs you require for SDN. Since SDN components run inside VMs, extra resources are consumed, and we account for this in our calculations.

 

 

 

Workloads 

 

Step 2 of the sizer asks for your workloads. You can create as many workloads as you want within a given project. We account for several workload types including General Purpose, VDI and SQL. Specifying VM details tells us how many vCPUs you need per VM, how many virtual cores you need to pack into each physical core and how much memory and storage you require per VM. We use this information to decide what hardware would satisfy your needs. 

 

 

 

 

Results 

 

Hooray! At this stage, you’ve completed all the steps and can see what hardware we recommend for your workloads. If you notice anything odd about your results, you can go back and edit your environmental preferences as well as your workloads from the results page. Our suggestion tells you the exact model, number of nodes and node level recommendations that would satisfy your needs. We also include utilization bars for cpu, memory and storage which shows you resource consumption and help you understand how we arrived at our recommendation.

 

 

 

Future plans

 

This is just the beginning of Sizer. We plan to update the tool regularly with more dimensions and features that will help you size your Azure Stack HCI. If you have feedback, please send it to hcisizer@microsoft.com!

 

May your year ahead be filled with happiness, adventure and a better sizing experience!

 

Until next time, 

Yasmeen 🙂

Updated Mar 22, 2023
Version 3.0
  • Hi yasmeen_jassim  Cosmos_Darwin are there any news to this tool or the Storage Calculator

    I do not see much progress on both of them since release while they are very important for presales and technical sizing. 

    In addition to my previous post the sizing tool still only works with MSA not with business accounts, I would prefer to use business accounts or do not require any sign-in, at the cost of not being able to save solutions. 

  • GbAustinCC's avatar
    GbAustinCC
    Copper Contributor

    Would be great to be able to select/change the drive size, node quantity, drive quantity, etc... 

  • Even if I split my VMs into separate workload records, the tool still cannot find suitable hardware =(

  • This tool was working late last year. I was using this to assist a customer who was considering Azure Stack HCI. For the last few days I have not been able to use this tool; it appears to be crashing when you attempt to create or open a project.

  • Pretty cool stuff 🙂

     

    Happy Azure Stacking!

  • Dear yasmeen_jassim Cosmos_Darwin can you tell if this useful calculator is now no longer in preview? 

    Would it be possible to import data like Live Optics? 

     

    And most importantly, why does the login do NOT support any business accounts while it is a business solution? In fact, you must sign in only with an MSA, not possibly with an EDU oder Business account. This is quite weird, especially for Microsoft Partners.