Azure Stack HCI version 23H2 is generally available
Today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Stack HCI version 23H2, and the Azure Arc infrastructure needed to provision virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters, and Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI. Together, these capabilities enable an adaptive cloud approach, empowering customers to deploy and operate everything from hardware to applications using Azure Resource Manager and core Azure management services.
Public Preview of Azure Migrate from VMware to Azure Stack HCI
We are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Migrate's latest functionality: seamless migration from VMware to Azure Stack HCI. This significant enhancement extends the power of cloud migration to the edge, offering cutting-edge performance and security while keeping your data securely on-premises. With Azure Migrate’s agent-less replication, minimal downtime, and network traffic optimized data transfer, this new capability ensures an efficient, smooth transition for your virtualized workloads. Explore the Azure Migrate today and experience the next evolution of virtualization and cloud integration.What's new for Azure Stack HCI at Microsoft Ignite 2022
Today at Microsoft Ignite 2022, we’re announcing new ways that Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI can help you operate hybrid seamlessly, including a new hybrid benefit for Software Assurance customers, public preview 2 of Azure Arc-enabled VM management, the general availability of version 22H2 packed with improvements, big changes for Azure Kubernetes Service, and an exciting surprise. Did somebody say hardware?We're moving!
Hello friends, Last week at Microsoft Ignite 2024 we introduced Azure Local, cloud infrastructure for distributed locations enabled by Azure Arc. Azure Local is an exciting new chapter for adaptive cloud. It replaces Azure Stack HCI and adds important new options like lower-cost edge devices (preview) and disconnected operations (preview). There is no action required for existing Azure Stack HCI customers: you'll transition seamlessly to Azure Local. If you haven’t already, check out the announcement blog. Azure Local is powered by Azure Arc, so it makes sense to unite the Tech Community blogs. Going forward, we’ll use the Azure Arc blog for Azure Local. We’ll migrate all the old content from the Azure Stack blog soon, to ensure that nothing is lost. On behalf of the team, I want to say a heartfelt thank you for all your enthusiasm, comments, and questions over the years. In the last decade, we’ve published more than 100 posts on this Azure Stack blog, and you’ve read them more than 1.3 million times! Technological progress is a journey with no end, but what really matters is the friends we made along the way. <3 Now… go follow the Azure Arc blog! We’re excited to keep the party going over there. - Cosmos and the Azure Local team
Hyper-V VM Migration to Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2
Written by Kerim Hanif, Senior Program Manager on the Azure Edge & Platform team Azure Migrate is a unified platform that simplifies migration, modernization, and optimization of on-premises resources to Azure. We have been working very closely with Azure Migrate team to add more destinations for Azure Migrate like VMware and Hyper-V. Last year we launched the private preview of Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) migration with Azure Migrate, and today we are very happy to announce the public preview of this capability. Note: VMware migration is currently in private preview. Please fill this form if you would like to be part of the private preview and help us build a high-quality migration capability. What is new in this public preview? This feature enables you to migrate your Windows and Linux VMs running on Hyper-V to Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2 clusters (GA as of Feb 1 st of this year). A wide range of source environments starting from Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2022 are supported. This feature uses the agentless migration option of Azure Migrate. This means that you don't need any prep such as installing an agent on the source VMs. All you need are two appliances, one on the source, and one on the target. While you can manage, monitor, and configure via the cloud (Azure Migrate), the data transfer between the source and the target is kept local. All the migrated VMs are Arc-enabled by default. This means that the full power of Arc VM management is immediately available to you once the migration is complete. Migrating variety of VMs (Windows and Linux) from Hyper-V to Azure Stack HCI How to get started? Make sure that you have an Azure Stack HCI cluster running version 23H2. Create a migration project in Azure Migrate. Discover the VMs on your source Hyper-V servers and clusters. Select the VMs you want to migrate and start replicating them to the target Azure Stack HCI cluster (source VMs can continue running at this stage). When ready, start the migration, and migrate your VMs with minimal downtime. Track the progress from the Azure portal. Where to learn more? For more information and detailed steps, please visit the following links: Options for migrating virtual machines to Azure Stack HCI (preview) Use Azure Migrate to move Hyper-V VMs to Azure Stack HCI (preview)Apply critical update for Azure Stack HCI VMs to maintain Azure verification
Recently, Microsoft rolled out critical updates for Azure verification for VMs on Azure Stack HCI, and we strongly recommend current users to apply these latest cumulative updates for continued, seamless functionality of your Azure benefits on Azure Stack HCI VMs.Introducing the all-new azure stack HCI sizing tool (preview)!
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 🙂
