Hi All,
After 5 public previews I am thrilled to announce the release candidate build of AKS on Azure Stack HCI! If you have not tried out AKS on Azure Stack HCI there is no better time than the present. You can evaluate the AKS on Azure Stack HCI release candidate by registering for the Public Preview here: https://aka.ms/AKS-HCI-Evaluate (If you have already downloaded AKS on Azure Stack HCI – this evaluation link has now been updated with the release candidate).
The release candidate build has a number of fixes and improvements in response to the feedback that we have been receiving from y'all over the past months.
There is a lot to cover - but here are some highlights:
Networking improvements -
We have further extended our networking configuration options, so that you can now configure separate networks for each Kubernetes cluster you want to deploy. You can even place separate Kubernetes clusters on separate VLANs. With this release we are also now providing full support for Calico networking (in addition to our previous support for Flannel).
Storage improvements -
We are now including a new CSI storage driver that allows you to use SMB & NFS shares for read-write many storage. This is in addition to our existing driver for VHDX based storage. We have also made updates to our Linux worker nodes to enable the use of OpenEBS on top of AKS on Azure Stack HCI.
Updated Kubernetes Versions -
In this update we have updated the supported Kubernetes versions to:
- Linux: 1.17.13, 1.17.16, 1.18.10, 1.18.14, 1.19.6, 1.19.7
- Windows: 1.18.10, 1.18.14, 1.19.6, 1.19.7
We have done a lot of work “behind the scenes” to increase the reliability of deployment - and made numerous improvements to the usability of our PowerShell and Windows Admin Center based experiences.
Once you have downloaded and installed the AKS on Azure Stack HCI release candidate – you can report any issues you encounter, and track future feature work on our GitHub Project at https://github.com/Azure/aks-hci. And, like with past releases, if you do not have the hardware handy to evaluate AKS on Azure Stack HCI you can follow our guide for evaluating AKS-HCI inside an Azure VM: https://aka.ms/aks-hci-evalonazure.
I look forward to hearing from you all!
Cheers,
Ben
