What is Microsoft Azure Stack HCI?

[Willa]

If you’ve been hearing about Microsoft^® Azure^® Stack HCI and wondering what it is, you’ve come to the right place!

Let’s start with what it’s not: Microsoft Azure Stack HCI isn’t a product. It’s a program that’s an evolution of the Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) program. Microsoft decided to bring WSSD into the Azure Stack family and changed the name to reflect the new options to connect with Azure infrastructure management.

Now, what it is: A certification program for solutions that bring together highly virtualized compute, local storage, and networking in the same cluster and then get validated by Microsoft to ensure optimal performance and reliability. These validated solutions make it easier to deploy, manage, and scale software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

HPE Solutions for Azure Stack HCI are on-premises hyperconverged clusters built on HPE hardware with Windows Server^® 2019 Datacenter. Microsoft validates the use of HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI to ensure optimal performance and reliability, as well as support for the latest technologies, such as NVMe drives, persistent memory, and remote-direct memory access networking.

These solutions also incorporate a number of Microsoft technologies:

• Microsoft Windows Hyper-V^® helps achieve industry-leading virtual machine (VM) performance.

• Storage Spaces Direct creates highly scalable, highly available software-defined storage. In case of a problem, Storage Spaces Direct begins repairing drives automatically and immediately.

• Failover clustering increases availability and scalability.

• Software-defined networking enables central configuration and management of physical and virtual network devices.

• Microsoft Azure Load Balancer delivers high availability and network performance by automatically scaling with increasing application traffic.
• Azure integration is built into the Windows Admin Center (WAC), which is a simplified, integrated, highly secure, cloud-ready server management solution. You can use it to manage Windows Server 2019 servers, clusters, HCI, and Windows^® 10 PCs. And it’s free to download.

• Plus, optional Azure Cloud management and security services—such as off-site cloud backup, site recovery, cloud-based monitoring, and more—are easy to connect to.

HPE Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI offer a choice of ready-to-go, validated solution configurations, based on specific HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers and components. A wide selection of validated HPE Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI provide a simpler, less costly way to deploy and manage storage compared to traditional SAN. They’re great for small to midsize businesses (SMBs), enterprise data centers, and remote and branch offices. They’re a great option for a variety of scenarios, including:

• Refreshing aging hardware with a modern HCI

• Consolidating virtual workloads onto fewer servers

• Streamlining access to cloud services with solutions that connect seamlessly with the Azure cloud

• Deploying scalable, high-availability storage

We’re also offering an HPE Small Business Solution for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, based on the HPE ProLiant DL180 Gen10 server. It’s a low-cost, scalable, and highly available storage solution that’s simple to deploy, manage, and support. It uses internal storage drives to create shared disk volumes in a high-availability cluster. These clusters can continue to operate normally, without downtime even if there’s a disk, network, or even a failure.

As always, when adding HPE OEM Windows Server 2019 licenses to the order, HPE is your single point of purchase, contact, and accountability for hardware and software support.