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Explore the management of your Azure Stack HCI 21H2 environment

Overview

With all key components deployed, including a management infrastructure, along with clustered Azure Stack HCI 21H2 nodes, you can now begin to explore some of the additional capabilities within Azure Stack HCI 21H2 and the Windows Admin Center. We'll cover a few recommended activities below, to expose you to some of the key elements of the Windows Admin Center, but for the rest, we'll direct you over to the official documentation.

Contents

Create volumes for VMs

In this step, you'll create some volumes on an Azure Stack HCI 21H2 cluster by using Windows Admin Center, and enable data deduplication and compression on volumes.

Create a two-way mirror volume

If you're not already there, open the Windows Admin Center. You'll spend your time here for the remainder of the steps documented below.

  1. Once logged into Windows Admin Center, click on your previously deployed cluster, azshciclus.azshci.local
  2. On the left hand navigation, under Storage select Volumes. The central Volumes page shows you should have a single volume currently
  3. On the Volumes page, select the Inventory tab, and then select Create
  4. In the Create volume pane, enter Volume01 for the volume name, and leave Resiliency as Two-way mirror
  5. In Size on HDD, specify 20GB for the size of the volume, then click Create.

Create a volume on Azure Stack HCI 21H2

  1. Creating the volume can take a few minutes. Notifications in the upper-right will let you know when the volume is created. The new volume appears in the Inventory list

Volume created on Azure Stack HCI 21H2

Optional - Create a mirror-accelerated parity volume

NOTE - This can only be perfomed on clusters with 4 or more nodes. If you just deployed a 2 node cluster, skip this optional step.

Mirror-accelerated parity reduces the footprint of the volume on the HDD. For example, a three-way mirror volume would mean that for every 10 terabytes of size, you will need 30 terabytes as footprint. To reduce the overhead in footprint, create a volume with mirror-accelerated parity. This reduces the footprint from 30 terabytes to just 22 terabytes, even with only 4 servers, by mirroring the most active 20 percent of data, and using parity, which is more space efficient, to store the rest. You can adjust this ratio of parity and mirror to make the performance versus capacity tradeoff that's right for your workload. For example, 90 percent parity and 10 percent mirror yields less performance but streamlines the footprint even further.

  1. Still in Windows Admin Center, on the Volumes page, select the Inventory tab, and then select Create
  2. In the Create volume pane, enter Volume02_PAR for the volume name, and set Resiliency as Mirror-accelerated parity
  3. In Parity percentage, set the percentage of parity to 80% parity, 20% mirror
  4. In Size on HDD, specify 20GB for the size of the volume, then click Create.

For more information on planning volumes with Azure Stack HCI 21H2, you should refer to the official docs.

Turn on deduplication and compression

You may have seen, during the Create volume wizard, you could have enabled deduplication and compression at creation time, however we wanted to make sure you were fully aware of how to enable it for existing volumes.

  1. Still in Windows Admin Center, on the Volumes page, select the Inventory tab, and then select your Volume01 volume
  2. On the Volume Volume01 pane, you'll see a simple rocker switch to enable Deduplication and compression. Click to enable it, and click Start

Enable deduplication on volume

  1. In the Enable deduplication pane, use the drop-down to select Hyper-V then click Enable Deduplication. This should be enabled quickly, as there's no files on the volume.

NOTE - You'll notice there there are 3 options; default, Hyper-V and Backup. If you're interested in learning more about Deduplication in Azure Stack HCI 21H2, you should refer to our documentation

You now have a couple of volumes created and ready to accept workloads. Whilst we deployed the volumes using the Windows Admin Center, you can also do the same through PowerShell. If you're interested in taking that approach, check out the official docs that walk you through that process

Deploy a virtual machine

In this step, you'll deploy a VM onto your new volume, using Windows Admin Center.

Create the virtual machine

You should still be in Windows Admin Center for the next steps.

  1. Once logged into the Windows Admin Center, click on your previously deployed cluster, azshciclus.azshci.local

  2. On the left hand navigation, under Compute select Virtual machines. The central Virtual machines page shows you no virtual machines deployed currently

  3. On the Virtual machines page, select the Inventory tab, and then select New

  4. In the New virtual machine pane, enter VM001 for the name, and enter the following pieces of information, then click Create

    • Generation: Generation 2 (Recommended)
    • Host: Leave as recommended
    • Path: C:\ClusterStorage\Volume01
    • Virtual processors: 1
    • Startup memory (GB): 0.5
    • Network: ComputeSwitch
    • Storage: Add, then Create an empty virtual hard disk and set size to 5GB
    • Operating System: Install an operating system later

  5. The creation process will take a few moments, and once complete, VM001 should show within the Virtual machines view

  6. Click on the VM and then click Start - within moments, the VM should be running

VM001 up and running

  1. Click on VM001 to view the properties and status for this running VM
  2. Click on Connect - you may get a VM Connect prompt:

Connect to VM001

  1. Click on Go to Settings and in the Remote Desktop pane, click on Allow remote connections to this computer, then Save
  2. Click the Back button in your browser to return to the VM001 view, then click Connect, and when prompted with the certificate prompt, click Connect and enter appropriate credentials
  3. There's no operating system installed here, so it should show a UEFI boot summary, but the VM is running successfully
  4. Click Disconnect

You've successfully create a VM using the Windows Admin Center!

Live migrate the virtual machine

The final step we'll cover is using Windows Admin Center to live migrate VM001 from it's current node, to an alternate node in the cluster.

  1. Still within the Windows Admin Center , under Compute, click on Virtual machines
  2. On the Virtual machines page, select the Inventory tab
  3. Under Host server, make a note of the node that VM001 is currently running on. You may need to expand the column width to see the name
  4. Next to VM001, click the tick box next to VM001, then click More. You'll notice you can Clone, Domain Join and also Move the VM. Click Move

Start Live Migration using Windows Admin Center

  1. In the Move Virtual Machine pane, ensure Failover Cluster is selected, and leave the default Best available cluster node to allow Windows Admin Center to pick where to migrate the VM to, then click Move
  2. The live migration will then begin, and within a few seconds, the VM should be running on a different node.
  3. On the left hand navigation, under Compute select Virtual machines to return to the VM dashboard view, which aggregates information across your cluster, for all of your VMs.

Shutting down the environment

When running the environment in Azure, to save costs, you may wish to shut down your nested VMs, and Hyper-V host. In order to do so, it's advisable to run the following commands, from the Hyper-V host, to cleanly power down the different components, before powering down the Azure VM itself.

  1. On your Hyper-V host, open PowerShell as administrator
  2. First, using PowerShell Direct, you'll log into one of the Azure Stack HCI 21H2 nodes to shutdown the cluster, then you'll power down the VMs running on your Hyper-V host
$domainName = "azshci.local"
$domainAdmin = "$domainName\azureuser"
$domainCreds = Get-Credential -UserName "$domainAdmin" -Message "Enter the password for the Admin account"
# Define node name
$nodeName = "AZSHCINODE01"
Invoke-Command -VMName $nodeName -Credential $domainCreds -ScriptBlock {
    # Get any running VMs and turn them off
    Get-ClusterResource | Where-Object {$_.ResourceType -eq "Virtual Machine"} | Stop-ClusterResource
    # Stop the cluster
    Stop-Cluster -Force
}
# Power down VMs on your Hyper-V host
Get-VM | Stop-VM -Force
  1. Once all the VMs are switched off, you can then shut down your Hyper-V host. If you're running this environment on physical gear on-prem, you're all done, but if you deployed in Azure, visit https://portal.azure.com/, and login with your Azure credentials. Once logged in, using the search box on the dashboard, enter "azshci" and once the results are returned, click on your AzSHCIHost virtual machine.

Virtual machine located in Azure

  1. Once on the overview blade for your VM, along the top navigation, click Stop, and then click OK. Your VM will then be deallocated and compute charges will cease.

Congratulations!

You've reached the end of the evaluation guide. In this guide you have:

  • Deployed/Configured a Hyper-V host in Azure fully configured with all necessary roles, features and Windows Admin Center.
  • Created an Azure Stack HCI 21H2 cluster, integrated with a cloud witness in Azure, and registered with Azure for billing
  • Used the Windows Admin Center to create and modify volumes, then deploy and migrate a virtual machine.

Great work!

Next steps

This part of the guide covers only a handful of key topics and capabilities that Azure Stack HCI 21H2 can provide. We'll be adding more shortly, but in the meantime, we'd strongly advise you to check out some of the key areas below:

Product improvements

If, while you work through this guide, you have an idea to make the product better, whether it's something in Azure Stack HCI 21H2, Windows Admin Center, or the Azure Arc integration and experience, let us know! We want to hear from you! Head on over to our Microsoft Q&A forum, where you can share your thoughts and ideas about making the technologies better. If however, you have an issue that you'd like some help with, read on...

Raising issues

If you notice something is wrong with the evaluation guide, such as a step isn't working, or something just doesn't make sense - help us to make this guide better! Raise an issue in GitHub, and we'll be sure to fix this as quickly as possible!

If however, you're having a problem with Azure Stack HCI 21H2 outside of this evaluation guide, make sure you post to our Microsoft Q&A forum, where Microsoft experts and valuable members of the community will do their best to help you.