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Beginner’s Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: Overview of Hyper-V Part 1
Beginner’s Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: How to Install Microsoft Hyper-V Using Server Manager – Part 2
Beginner’s Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: How to Install Microsoft Hyper-V with PowerShell – Part 3
Beginner’s Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: How to Install Microsoft Hyper-V in Windows Server Core – Part 4
Beginner’s Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: Remote Management of Hyper-V – Part 5
Beginner’s Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V: How to Install Hyper-V Server – Part 6
Introduction
So far, in the Hyper-V beginner’s series, we have been learning about the traditional Hyper-V solution from Microsoft, included in Windows Server and also in the form of the free Hyper-V Server solution. However, Hyper-V Server is a dead product after Windows Server 2019. The future of Hyper-V itself is a bit murky as well since Microsoft has released Azure Stack HCI. What is Azure Stack HCI, and how does it weigh into learning Microsoft Hyper-V?
What is Azure Stack HCI?
You may have seen mention of Azure Stack HCI in the last couple of years mentioned as Microsoft’s HCI solution moving forward. Like many software companies, Microsoft is heavily transitioning to cloud-enabled and cloud-licensed solutions and services.
Microsoft’s hyper converged infrastructure offering will be no different moving forward. Azure Stack HCI provides the next-generation hybrid infrastructure solution from Microsoft that builds on the technologies exposed with Microsoft Azure integration.
Microsoft describes Azure Stack HCI as the premier hyperconverged infrastructure platform for running VMs or virtual desktops on-premises with connections to Azure hybrid services
Azure Stack HCI features and advantages
What features and advantages are offered by Azure Stack HCI? Azure Stack HCI is the best platform for organizations looking to move forward with modernizing their existing workloads in the data center with additional features and capabilities for other locations like branch and Remote Office Branch Office locations.
It provides the quickest way to benefit from all the bleeding edge innovations from Microsoft that exist in Microsoft Azure. Since Azure Stack HCI is directly connected with Azure, it has a more direct relationship with the features and capabilities exposed to native Azure services, as we will see below.
Azure Stack HCI limitations
Are there limitations of Azure Stack HCI to note? Yes, there are. Azure Stack HCI is a purpose-built operating system meant to run virtualized workloads. It is not a general-purpose Windows Server distribution that you can use to house file shares or other traditional enterprise data center services. As such, it does not include client Client Access Licenses (CALs) that have traditionally existed with Windows Server for client connectivity to various back office services.
Should beginners learn Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server Hyper-V?
For a beginner, which should you learn? Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server Hyper-V? It may not be so simple to make a choice of learning one solution over the other. Like any IT tool, solution, service, software, or hardware, there isn’t one solution that fits every use case.
Azure Stack HCI
Azure Stack HCI is also not a free product. You can get your hands on a 60-day trial edition of Azure Stack HCI. However, things are additionally complicated as you also need to have an Azure subscription of some sort to license your Azure Stack HCI installation since it is tied together with Azure.
Note the following prerequisites to Azure Stack HCI:
1. An Azure subscription capable of deploying Azure VMs with at least 16 virtual CPUs. If you don’t, you have two options that support the Azure VM requirements:
- If you have a Visual Studio subscription, Activate your Azure credits
- Sign up for a free subscription, then upgrade it to pay-as-you-go. The upgrade to pay-as-you-go is required in order to host the VM size required for this evaluation and gives you 30 days to use the $200 credit from the free subscription
2. An Azure account capable of accessing:
- Your Azure subscription using Azure RBAC membership in:
- either the “Owner” role (you’ll already be a member if you created the subscription)
- or the “User Access Administrator” and “Contributor” roles
- Your Azure Active Directory (AD) tenant using Azure AD RBAC membership in:
- either the “Global Administrator” role (you’ll already be a member if you created the subscription)
- or the “Cloud application administrator” role
3. A basic understanding of how to use the Azure portal, particularly creating and connecting to a VM
With a trial subscription to Microsoft Azure using Visual Studio or a free account that transitions to a pay-as-you-go subscription, you can try out Azure Stack HCI. In addition, you can evaluate an Azure Stack HCI cluster without hardware using a nested virtualization lab. Instead, you can use a Windows Server 2022 Datacenter virtual machine running in Azure to host the Azure Stack HCI cluster.
The logical architecture of the nested solution looks like the following:
So, you can learn and play around with Azure Stack HCI. It is just more involved than getting a simple download of Windows Server from the Microsoft Evaluation Center and installing it in your home lab environment.
Azure Stack HCI has technologies with HCI not found in Windows Server 2022, such as stretched clustering with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), highly available GPU workload clustering, kernel-only restarts, single host clusters, storage spaces direct thin provisioning, cluster-aware OS feature update, and others.
Windows Server Hyper-V
Learning Windows Server Hyper-V and related technologies is still very relevant. Like any new technology coming down the pipes, it will take a long while for the traditional legacy technologies to be replaced with newer architectures and technologies like Azure Stack HCI.
Also, as mentioned, Azure Stack HCI is a very special purpose implementation of Windows Server built for hyperconverged infrastructure running virtualized workloads. It is still relevant for running virtual machines and containers with very modern capabilities found in Windows Server 2022 and is still the operating system that allows deploying Active Directory, file services, DNS, DHCP, and other core infrastructure technologies.
Also, remember that Azure Stack HCI is built on top of the core virtualization technologies that started with Windows Server Hyper-V. These technologies include Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), and software-defined networking. Therefore, you will have a great foundational knowledge of any of the new Azure-based technologies by learning the foundational concepts in Windows Server Hyper-V and the core technologies involved.
Learning Windows Server Hyper-V is a bit easier to get started since there is less barrier to entry from a lab perspective. As we mentioned above, you have to get a subscription for Azure Stack HCI and a subscription for Azure. With Windows Server, you can easily get a 180-day evaluation from the Microsoft Evaluation Center.
Wrapping up
Azure Stack HCI is a powerful new purpose-built operating system from Microsoft that is the future of virtualization on-premises and extends many Azure capabilities to the enterprise data center and edge locations. For beginners starting out learning virtualization, Azure Stack HCI can be more challenging to obtain for lab purposes since it requires a trial of the OS itself and an Azure subscription for licensing and activation.
Windows Server Hyper-V technologies are still very relevant and contain the foundational building blocks used by Azure Stack HCI. Beginners can certainly get their feet wet with traditional Windows Server operating systems and also gain experience with Azure Stack HCI with free subscriptions to Azure with the $200 credit.
Learn more about Azure Stack HCI here: Azure Stack HCI documentation | Microsoft Docs
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