What is it? A new web-based, customer driven sizing tool to supplement the existing documentation for Azure Stack HCI. It’s aim is to help customers plan and size their solutions correctly and remove some of the guess work. It is linked to the hardware catalog and will list the appropriate hardware from your proffered Vendor, based […]
Azure Benefits on Azure Stack HCI
What are they? Since Azure Stack HCI is considered an Azure service, Microsoft is enabling you to run a range of workloads and capabilities that you would usually only able to run in Azure, directly on your own Azure Stack HCI on-premises and edge environments. Check out the official article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure-stack/hci/manage/azure-benefits Why is this useful […]
Windows Server Guest Subscription Licensing for Azure Stack HCI
What is it? Microsoft recently announced the preview of Subscription based licensing on Azure Stack HCI. This will allow you to purchase unlimited Windows Server guest licenses for your Azure Stack HCI cluster through your Azure subscription. Please click the following link to see their official page: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/public-preview-windows-server-guest-licensing-offer-for-azure-stack-hci/ Why is this a big deal? Moving […]
Azure Stack HCI 21H2
Since Azure Stack HCI version 21H2 went GA, people might be wondering what the differences are between the previous version (20H2) and what new features they can enjoy? I’ll list some key features below and please check out this post from Cosmos Darwin for the full details: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-stack-blog/what-s-new-for-azure-stack-hci-at-microsoft-ignite-2021/ba-p/2897222 Exciting New Key Features Azure Virtual Desktop […]
Azure Extended Networks
In this blog post I’m going to discuss Azure Extended Networks, why you might need them (but ideally shouldn’t) and how to set them up. What are they? Azure Extended Networks enable you to stretch an on-premises subnet into Azure to let on-premises virtual machines keep their original on-premises private IP addresses when migrating to […]
Extending OS Volumes for Virtual Machines
Ever tried to extend an OS Volume / system partition for a virtual machine but couldn’t, even though you expanded the VHDX? A likely reason is that the VM’s OS was deployed with a Recovery Partition and the additional space is not accessible to the OS Partition. What’s causing this? The ‘Recovery Partition’ is located […]
Defender Status Reporting
In this post I am going to explain what I’ve done to report on the status of Microsoft Defender on cluster nodes. Why? The reason I spent time on this, is that I couldn’t find an easy way to see if (and check that) Defender was running and being updated regularly. I don’t use SCCM […]
Virtual Disk Repair Times
On S2D Clusters, here is a small code snippet that I find useful to see how Virtual Disk repairs are going after rebooting a node or replacing a disk. It will also attempt to estimate the remaining time left (shout-out to Russell Workman for that addition):
VM Storage Performance
On S2D Clusters, here is a one-line PowerShell that I find useful to see which node is seeing the highest IOPS:
WAC via Proxy
Windows Admin Center is an excellent Management Tool and an ideal way to manage your Azure Stack HCI clusters. I first started using it in anger in 2019, but quickly encountered and issue in that there was no obvious way to allow it to talk out via a proxy server? Now if you’re anything like […]