Ever since the new version of Azure Stack HCI was announced at Microsoft Inspire 2020, there has been a real buzz about the solution and where it is going. Thomas Maurer has written a great article detailing the technology improvements here. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do!

If you want to get hands-on, there are a few options here to do so:

Deploy the preview to existing Hardware
Deploy on your existing Virtualization platform (use Nested Virtualization)
Deploy to a VM in Azure (using a VM Series that supports Nested Virtualization)

Matt McSpirit has written a fantastic step-by-step guide for deploying to virtualized platforms; again - highly recommend reading it.

You can also check out MSLab https://github.com/microsoft/MSLab which automates the deployment to Hyper-V environments

However, I want to write about deploying to physical hardware that I’m lucky enough to have access to that will be more representative of what real world deployments will look like. I won’t go into the full process, as the Microsoft documentation goes through all the steps, but I will explain how I installed it onto physical servers that aren’t officially supported

Hardware

I have access to a number of Dell EMC PowerEdge R630 servers that were originally used to host ASDK on , so I know they meet the majority of the requirements to run Hyper-V / S2D. Dell EMC don’t officially support this server for HCI, but I’m only using it to kick the tires, so I’m not bothered about that.

Each Server has:

2 x 12 core Xeon E5-2670 processors
384 GB RAM
5 x 480GB SSD drives
Perc H730 mini RAID controller
4 x Emulex 10GB NICs

The only real issue with the list above is the H730 controller. As it is RAID, it could cause issues, and Dell EMC recommend using a HBA330 controller, as per this thread. I don’t have any HBA330’s to hand, so I had to make do and try and make it work (spoiler alert: I did get it working, details later!)

Preparing the Hardware

The first thing I had to do was to ensure that each server was configured correctly from a hardware perspective. To do this, connect to the iDRAC interface for each of the servers and make the following changes, if needed.

First, I had to make sure the Perc R730 controller is set to ‘HBA’ mode.

Navigate to Storage / Controllers

From the Setup tab, I checked the current value for the Controller Mode. It should be set to ‘HBA’

If it isn’t, from the corresponding Action dropdown, select HBA.

From the Apply Operation Mode dropdown, select At Next Reboot and then click on Apply

Next, I navigate to iDRAC Settings / Network. Select the OS to iDRAC Pass-Through tab. Make sure Pass-through configuration is Disabled, and Apply changes if necessary

Reboot the server now for the changes to apply to the controller mode.

Next on the list was to ensure that your BIOS and Firmware are up to date. I used the Sever Update Utility from the LifeCycle controller, as documented here to do this.

Once all that was complete, I could start to deploy the Azure Stack HCI OS.

Installing Azure Stack HCI OS

There’s two things that we need to download; Azure Stack HCI ISO and Windows Admin Center (latest version is 2103.2). To get the necessary files, you need to sign up for the public preview. Fill in your details here and go grab them. WAC can be downloaded here as well.

Once you have the ISO, go ahead and connect to your Virtual Console and connect the Virtual Media (version downloaded via the Eval link is AzureStackHCI_17784.1408_EN-US.iso). On more than one occasion I forgot to click on Map Device, that wasted a few minutes!

To make things a little easier, go to the iDRAC, Server / Setup. Change the First Boot Device to Virtual CD/DVD/ISO and then apply the changes.

Next thing is to restart the server. I had to make sure I didn’t get distracted as after a couple of minutes of running through the BIOS steps, it prompts for you to press any key to boot from the CD/DVD. The image below shows it’s going to try and boot from the Virtual CD…

…and the following is if you don’t press a key in time :)

I won’t detail the installation process of the Azure Stack HCI OS, as there are very little configuration items required, just make sure you select the correct drive/partition to install the OS on (Drive 0 for me, I wiped all the volumes/partitions)

After a while (it can be slow doing an install via the Virtual Media) HCI OS will be installed. You’ll need to set an administrator password on first login.

Once that’s set, the config menu appears.

From here, first thing was for me to confirm I had a valid IP address, so selected 8 and then the NIC I wanted to use for management. The only other thing I really had to do was to set the computer name, so I did that, but I also added the system to a domain, just so I knew that name resolution and networking was working as expected.

I rinsed/repeated for all the servers (4 of them) that I wanted to form my HCI cluster.

Follow the instructions here to deploy the cluster.

Fixing Storage Spaces Direct Deployment

When going through the cluster installation, I did encounter one error that blocked the deployment of S2D. This could be seen in the Failover Cluster Validation report.