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- What security features does Azure Stack HCI offer to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with industry regulations, especially for organizations in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare or finance?
- Jeff-Woolsey
Microsoft
Great question! With Azure Stack HCI use you can Azure Policy to deliver consistent policy (compliance, GDPR, etc.) to your workloads running on Azure Stack HCI and to the Azure Stack HCI systems themselves. There are hundreds of policies already available in Azure that you can pick and choose from so you don't need to start from scratch. You can of course create your own policies as well. You can learn more about Azure Policy here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/overviewJen05 infact a great question. You can have a view on what's supported - and that's quite a lot to comply with different industry standards.
Granted it is a bit hidden
Defender for Cloud > Environment Settings > choose your management group or policy you need to control with a specific standard.This will drill down recommendations to meet these standards via Azure Policy.
For Azure Resource, Azure Stack HCI and quite likely on-prem resources when protected with Defender for Cloud through Azure Arc.
https://portal.azure.com/#view/Microsoft_Azure_Security/ManagementGroupSettingsBlade/~/SecurityPolicies/
- What is the cost of the subscriptions for on-prem Hot patching?
- Jeff-WoolseyIf you're using Windows Server Azure Edition in Azure or on Azure Stack HCI, it's included at no additional cost. For Arc-enabled Windows Server 2025 Standard and Datacenter, pricing is TBD.
- Can we leverage the existing hardware to virtualize the VMs using Azure stack HCI to avoid the upfront costs?
- Jeff-WoolseyFor production use, we recommend you look at hardware on the Azure Stack HCI catalog because the hardware systems have been curated and validated. We're trying to avoid people setting up Azure Stack HCI on 5-year-old hardware with random NICs and then having issues because the hardware is missing features and offloads that HCI uses. There are over 500 Azure Stack HCI Solutions available. If you want to try out Azure Stack HCI, contact your favorite hardware partner and tell them you'd like to see if they have any evaluation units for a proof of concept. Finally, if you have recent hardware and want to try it for evaluation, you can install it yourself. The system requirements are here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/system-requirements?tabs=azure-public
- I think the reasons partners say that is because of the lack of adoption/feature full integrations that exist with partners (when compared to vmware). vCenter is also a much better tool than anything Microsoft provides out of the box to manage, and it doesn't seem to get any focus to make it better. WAC was a hope, but seemed to die out in terms of further advancements.
- Jeff-WoolseyWindows Admin Center is well under development with more features on the way, but it's not meant to compete with vCenter. Never has. The better comparison is the Azure Portal. With Azure you can manage your Azure Stack HCI deployments running around the globe. You constantly get new features which light up in the cloud and you never have to deal with traditional datacenter lifecycle management. You can monitor, backup, secure, improve governance, enable business continuity, patch management for your resources running anywhere. If you're a Sysadmin, IT Professional, DevOps and you aren't learning the Azure Portal now, you should.
- Besides the Azure Stack HCI sizer tool. Does Microsoft have an assessment tool available to analyze a workload on an existing VM environment and use that workload information as input for the Azure stack HCI sizer tool?
- Jeff-WoolseyThe Azure Migrate tool has assessment built in. Learn more here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-migrate/
- More information about AVS here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-vmware/ Migrate VMware VMs to Azure (agentless) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/tutorial-migrate-vmware
- With AMD leading Intel is most areas of server compute and only continuing to take server market share, I’d like to see more Epyc specific integrations, optimizations, and support across MS services like hyper-v.
- Jeff-WoolseyWindows Server Hyper-V supports the latest greatest AMD EPYC processors...
- Yes, but there's a big difference between eventually supporting functionality and a true partnership of feature development. This is an area where there's undoubtably been an Intel first mindset.
- What would be huge is if Windows Server and Hyper-V supported NFS instead of just ISCUSI channels to storage.
Cameron_PeppersSMB/NFS via Tintri and NetApp (amongst others) + Hyper-V is supported and has worked for many years, the built in SCVMM integration with both via SMI-S also streamlines this deployment scenario.- Except that NetApp hasn't made any updates to their SMI-S provider in ages, and Server 2022/SCVMM 2022 is technically unsupported. NetApp ONTAP isn't even listed as a supported storage appliance as of 2022. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/system-center/vmm/supported-arrays?view=sc-vmm-2022 It _was_ supported in 2019.
- Yeah. NFS would be ideal, but they can use SMB3 from NAS arrays which brings things like SMB multichannel and what-not.
- true many do not consider the benefits of SMB Multichannel and other technology when it comes to storage and networking. Most are still on iSCSI with the given limitations and efficiency constraints / CPU use / bottlenecks.
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