Installing Azure Stack HCI 23H2 in VMs (Part1)

[@marianabuhazi9906]

Incredible tutorial. Thank you for sharing!

[@olivermacgregor3992]

well said!

[@craigmcdonald1098]

great video - opened my eyes a bit. but seriously how can I see part 2 - the suspense is killing me.

[@thehybridfriends]

Part two will be published on Friday :)

[@anthonydelagarde3990]

Thank you for the video and information. Great presentation.

[@thehybridfriends]

Glad it was helpful!

[@ThisIsCvE]

Hello! :) Thanks for your work and for sharing it with the community. Is it possible to customize scripts to deploy more than two nodes. I'd like to play around with ARM deployment of the three-node switchless deployment.

[@nimmyjintz]

Thank you for the fantastic tutorial! I really appreciate you sharing it!...

[@piotrsocha1932]

Hello. Thanks for the tutorial, but I'm stuck on the resolving external dns names from the hci hosts using the 192.168.0 network. DC working fine and resolve the names. Any ideas?

[@thehybridfriends]

Check that the DC has DNS installed. It uses the 8.8.8.8 as forwarder to resolve internet names. Maybe you need to change this (if your FW does not allow this.) to the DNS of the EXT interface. On the HCI node. -> cmd.exe -> nslookup -> does it resolve to (192.168.0.1)? if not - what DNS settings did it get (ipconfig /all) ? if yes - can you resolve the domain hci00.org? if yes can you resolve ibm.com? If this does not help - pls open up a github issue on the repo and we'll troubleshoot from there. hth, B

[@piotrsocha1932]

Thansks for the answer. I ran the deployment again and I correct the execution policy to bypass. The problem was, that domain controller role was not installed and role with routing and DC was installed manually. Now it is working. Thanks again.

[@craigmcdonald1098]

just watched this again - do you know when 23h2 is likely to support stretch clustering? I want stretch clustering and don't necessarily want to deploy 22h2 (tech debt) across all our sites.

[@thehybridfriends]

Yesterday Microsoft published an article that stretched cluster is not support from 23h2 going forward. You should either use Azure site recovery or hyper v replica instead.

[@thehybridfriends]

techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurearcblog/evolving-stretch-clustering-for-azure-local/4352751

[@craigmcdonald1098]

@thehybridfriends oh, thanks for the reply

[@craigmcdonald1098]

@@thehybridfriends what are the chances you guys are will have some more information on Rack Clusters soon? - as mentioned in the recent article.

[@thehybridfriends]

@@craigmcdonald1098 I wrote an article about that optiosn several years ago when we were already testing the limits. petri.com/network-requirements-for-azure-stack-hci-active-active-cluster-nodes/

[@marcfritz-w2q]

So first thanks for this video! I am currently trying to follow it and was able to deploy the DC and the two HCI VMs. But for the DC I had to create the Golden Image from a standard Windows Server 2022 ISO as the Image Index 4 is not available for the Azure Stack HCI image. Checked with "dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:M:\sources\install.esd" and only got one result: Index : 1 Name : Azure Stack HCI Description : This option installs Azure Stack HCI. Size : 9,526,906,146 bytes After creation I was able to connect to the DC VM and had to "do it later" at the license key screen. After that I was able to login and figured out that the IP settings in 3_PostInstallScript.psd1 have not been used. The DC VM got a DHCP address from that network (was available via network tho). When I tried to change the IP Windows mentioned an error that has to be fixed with reboot. After that the two network adapters had default names and just DHCP. So some questions about that: 1) Could it be that the Azure Stack HCI ISO has changed since you made that video? Filename is 25398.469.231004-1141.zn_release_svc_refresh_SERVERAZURESTACKHCICOR_OEMRET_x64FRE_en-us.iso 2) Should your script also work with default Windows images? If so what could be the reason that the network settings haven't been used? 3) Why do I need the DC VM in the first place? Would be very happy about a reply, Best regards, Marc

[@thehybridfriends]

Hi Marc, To your questions: 1) The image has not changed for quite a while now - so it should work. This .iso however is only for HCI so it e.g. does not contain a regular Win Server image. 2) Yes. The mechanisms are quite old i.e. using unattend.xml file inside a generalized windows image. I tried Win client and server OS. 3) pls have a look at the additional descriptions made at: github.com/bfrankMS/CreateHypervVms/tree/master/Scenario-AzStackHCI The pictures there should help to better understand the setup and the purpose of the e.g. DC. Basically its providing 4 important things: A gui to manage HCI, AD Domain services, DNS resolution and routing of the internal HCI hosts to the internet via your gateway. The when you see the product key screen then not all steps could be performed automatically - i.e. no surprise that additional steps are failing (e.g. nic renaming + IPs not set,...) -> when you select the windows server iso to create the VHDX from (and yes you need to take a separate windows server iso - as it is not in the HCI iso) -> you can either take an eval copy (requires no windows key) - which I did (www.microsoft.com/de-de/evalcenter) or take a regular win srv .iso file and provide a product key...the blueprint sample describes how to do it: github.com/bfrankMS/CreateHypervVms/blob/master/Scenario-Blueprint/2_UnattendSettings.psd1 hth, B