Announcing Jumpstart HCIBox

Microsoft

Oct 12, 2022

With Azure Stack HCI adoption by customers and partners growing, and the global supply chain still recovering, the need for a solid testing lab is critical to our success. Today, we are excited to announce the are announcing the public preview for Jumpstart HCIBox!

We've been hearing from customers and partners that the Azure Arc Jumpstart is an instrumental part of their Azure Arc learning journey, and we want to ensure that the things you expect from Azure Arc in the Jumpstart carries over to Azure Stack HCI also.

Introducing Jumpstart HCIBox

Till today, the Azure Arc Jumpstart focus was around providing targeted Azure Arc automated scenarios and the ArcBox portfolio. With HCIBox and the great partnership between the Jumpstart team and the “Azure Core OS + Edge Infrastructure" (CO+EI) engineering team, we are now able to expand to the world of the entire Azure Hybrid Cloud and Edge solutions.

HCIBox is a turnkey solution that provides a complete sandbox for exploring Azure Stack HCI capabilities and hybrid cloud integration in a virtualized environment. HCIBox is designed to be completely self-contained within a single Azure subscription and resource group, which will make it easy for a user to get hands-on with Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc technology without the need for physical hardware.

Challenges and motivation

Designing and developing HCIBox was a natural next step for the Jumpstart team. So, what was the motivation around it and the challenges we saw in the wild and wanted to solve?

Numerous HCI lab guides at varying levels of completeness or quality.
Lack of end-to-end automation to deploy HCI with integrated Azure Arc services.
Need to provide partners and customers with a complete sandbox for testing and training.
Need for faster times to test/POC without waiting for hardware procurement or other delays.
Laying the ground for future Azure Stack HCI Landing Zone Accelerator.

Design principles and automation

The Jumpstart design principles are our cornerstone and the reason we are able to solve complex problems with elegant solutions. HCIBox design principles are no different and share our overall Jumpstart philosophy.

A dedicated sandbox environment for testing GA or public preview capabilities of Azure Arc. No private preview features are included.
Self-contained in Azure with no dependencies on having physical hardware.
Showcase HCI integration with hybrid services and tools (Azure Arc and Windows Admin Center).
Comprehensive, repeatable, reliable.
Modular flexibility and configuration for the user.

For this public preview, the automation will support Azure Bicep and like Jumpstart ArcBox, will be based on a simple deployment to build and configure the infrastructure and services.