My experience with AzureStack in a multinode setup

I know that I have been more than usual quiet in my blogging the latest months, that is because we have had much at work and I have been over my head in new tech stuff and among that I also been the lead in the implementation of our AzureStack multinode.

I will do a couple of blog posts about my experience and caveats that I have stumbled on so keep checking back!

First of all Me self and Geir-Morten from our company will do a session on friday at the NIC conference in Oslo

The Three Amigos fighting compliance with Azure Stack

Hybrid cloud with Azure Stack can deliver great benefits to your organization, helping you innovate and get faster to market. But at the same time also protect your sensitive information and stay compliant with regulations like GDPR. This session will focus on the different roles associated with the Azure Stack, from operating the Stack to the developer and IT pro bringing their solution into a true hybrid environment. The sessions will be packed with demos on a Azure Stack multi-node system showing the different roles in action in environment spanning not only Azure and Azure Stack, but also private clouds.

I hope that I will see you there!

 

SCVMM 2016 with cu4 can not add more than 64 vCPUs

We have some demands on BIG-ASS VM´s and in our new environment with System Center 2016 and VMM 2016 we tried to add a hardware profile with more than 64 vCPU´s as now in Hyper-V 2016 we can have a VM with 240 vCPU´s and 12 TB of ram, but that cannot be done 🙁

We have also updated with the latest SCVMM CU4 but still no success! Neither via GUI or via PowerShell!

We installed a new Preview of SCVMM 1711 to see if it was any difference and guess what! It has finally been updated but we would much rather see it also comming in a CU in the near time for VMM 2016 as we cannot deploy a preview of the semianual into production..

The gui also have been updated for a hardware profile where it clearly states that it has to be a gen2 vm and also the OS cannot be lower than 2016 for both host and vm

 

Speaking at Microsoft Ignite

I have got the opportunity to speak at Ignite again, this will be my third year I will do a session on this gigantic conference!

I have a Community Theater Session where I would love to have you as a guest if you will also be there and have some time for this topic!

“Using a PowerShell release pipeline for a real-world service provider delivery in Microsoft Azure”

Delivering managed services for a service provider can be cumbersome and often the quality and reliability is not first priority. Utilizing PowerShell and Desired State Configuration makes it repetitive, versionable, and testable! In this real-world case we have implemented a release pipeline to make sure that PowerShell scripts, modules, and dsc configurations are tested before put into production use in Azure Automation.

here you can find it in the session catalog

It is scheduled on Tuesday 4:05-4:25

Adding the App Service to my AzureStack DevKit

After installing/deploying the AzureStack DevKit i added the SQL RP and also wanted to add the App Service Resource Provider for a dev experience!

I have an relative ordinary HPE 380 G9 box with 128 GB of ram and 2 CPU´s so it should be fine, but there was some issues that I wanted to document to help others, this will probably be fixed in an later release of the App Service install pack though.

I downloaded the bits and ran the deploy App Service

After filling this out the deployment started but after a few hours it failed during the deploy step, I tried the Retry a couple of times but without luck, also closing the wizard makes you lose the stage of deploy and need to rerun the whole deploy! When doing a redeploy you have to delete the resource group APPSERVICE-LOCAL (or what you called it) and also go into your SQL server that you entered into the wizard and remove the appservice db´s!!

How did I mange to get it working though? I got some help from Andrew at Microsoft that works with the Stack team and he gave me some guidance how to get it into a good state! Apparently the App Service adds all uppdates during deploy and to be more successful the recommendation was to update with patches that was released up until last tuesday with the win2016 image and thus update to latest CU, mine came from the marketplace syndication with Azure and that one had not the patches when I did this test, I threw that away and ran the create image script adding the parameter for -includeLatestCU.

Rerunning the wizard and when it allthough had a image with latest and greatest patches got stuck on “App Service Deploy Failed” I went into the CN0-VM and opened the mmc for the state of the different servers in the App Service

I also hit the repair link and when all of them said “Ready” I added a new 0.status file I got from Andrew into the custom script folder on the CN0-VM, easiest way to do that was with the lovely PowerShell Direct that is part of the Win 2016!

and then went back into the wizard hitting Retry and this time it continued to the finish and my deployment was successful!

Good luck in your deployment!

Installing the AzureStack DevKit GA edition

Yesterday during the start of Microsoft Partner Conference Inspire the AzureStack was released as GA and also was made available for the devkit version to be downloaded!

Of course I had to test it and now thanks to the new installation powershell script with a gui it is even more easy than ever to start the deployment… First of all I downloaded the kit, It helps to have a 10 Gbit internet connection at the datacenter 😉 and then download the Powershell script.

Once the bits had been extracted I could use the wizard to prepare the unattended-file and the boot-from-vhd for the cloudbuilder.vhdx and reboot the server to continue the deployment!

After reboot I could start the same wizard to start deployment of the Stack

There was issues with the deploy script yesterday me and Ruud  reported which was quickly fixed by Marc van Eijk, the problems was that if added a vlan or a dns the deploy failed.

I also found an issue that if as in my case the firewall in front of my stack did not allow for external NTP sources I ended up in a failed deploy because it requires a NTP sync before continuing, so I had to configure an internal NTP source and then the deploy succeeded!

The deployment took about 4 hours and once that was completed I could fire up an browser and connect to the portal!

Good luck in your stack dev tests!