What Is Azure HCI and Its Key Features

Azure HCI is a cloud-based solution that allows you to manage and run your virtual machines on-premises and in the cloud.

It's designed to provide a consistent and scalable platform for running virtual machines, regardless of where they're hosted.

Azure HCI supports both AMD and Intel processors, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of hardware configurations.

This flexibility makes it an attractive option for organizations with mixed IT environments.

Azure HCI is a validated solution that offers unprecedented performance, high availability, and scalability. It's a result of close collaboration between ASUS and Microsoft.

Azure HCI is built on a hyper-converged infrastructure stack, which simplifies IT management and integrates easily with Windows Admin Center. This means you can manage your entire infrastructure in one place.

The solution provides pre-validated and Microsoft-certified hardware, ensuring a secure and efficient virtualization of Windows and Linux guests. Consolidating your IT infrastructure with Azure HCI can save you upgrade costs.

By using Azure HCI, you can easily integrate and simplify IT management of HCI deployments, making it a great option for businesses looking to upgrade their infrastructure. This is especially useful for those with aging servers and storage.

Azure Stack HCI offers a robust set of features and benefits that make it an attractive choice for organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure. With built-in integration with Microsoft's Azure cloud service, you can easily transition from on-premise, hardware-defined infrastructure to a modern cloud-based environment.

One of the key benefits of Azure Stack HCI is its scalability, with the ability to scale from just two nodes all the way up to 16. This makes it an excellent choice for organizations with varying resource needs.

Azure Stack HCI provides industry-leading storage performance using leading-edge technologies in ASUS validated servers. This results in blazing fast performance, making it ideal for applications that require high performance.

Here are some of the key features and benefits of Azure Stack HCI:

Azure Stack HCI also offers a flexible pricing model that helps organizations grow into their cloud infrastructure, and includes advanced security features like shielded virtual machines and encrypted networks.

Azure Stack HCI solutions provide industry-leading storage performance using leading-edge technologies in ASUS validated servers, giving you blazing fast performance that can scale from just two nodes all the way up to 16.

High-performance disks for quick file access and data optimization are available to help teams manage high-demand environments. Azure Stack HCI offers many solutions that help teams monitor performance across their infrastructure and increase performance.

Features like mirror-accelerated parity, data duplication, and Windows Failover Clustering ensure you get the most from your hardware investment. This allows for a highly available platform to run Microsoft SQL Server, leveraging the power of state-of-the-art hardware and Storage Spaces Direct.

GPU partitioning for AI and machine learning jobs is also available, making Azure Stack HCI an optimal platform for tasks that require intense computational power.

Azure Stack HCI offers a robust set of features that make it an excellent choice for organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure.

Its hybrid cloud functionality makes it stand out from the crowd, allowing for seamless integration between on-premise infrastructure and cloud services.

With built-in integration with Microsoft's Azure cloud service, you can easily transition from on-premise, hardware-defined infrastructure to a modern cloud-based environment.

Azure Stack HCI provides industry-leading storage performance using leading-edge technologies in ASUS validated servers, giving you blazing fast performance that can scale from just two nodes all the way up to 16.

Features like mirror-accelerated parity, data duplication, and Windows Failover Clustering ensure you get the most from your hardware investment.

Here are some of the key benefits of Azure Stack HCI:

Azure Stack HCI offers the optimal platform for VDI, using an ASUS-validated HCI solution and Microsoft's mature Remote Desktop Services to achieve a highly available, highly scalable architecture.

Azure HCI is built on proven technologies including Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct, and core Azure Management service. Each instance consists of 1 to 16 physical machines, all sharing common configurations and resources through Windows Server Failover Clustering.

Azure HCI supports validated hardware from a hardware partner and runs on Azure Stack HCI OS. It features Hyper-V-based compute resources and Storage Spaces Direct-based virtualized storage. You can deploy Windows and Linux virtual machines as Arc-enabled servers.

Azure HCI also supports Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enabled by Azure Arc, and AI and machine learning workload deployment. Additionally, it integrates with Azure services including monitoring, backup, site recovery, and more.

Here are some of the management and deployment options for Azure HCI:

Azure HCI requires some basic information for deployment, including server name, domain name, computer account names, organizational unit, static IP address, RDMA networking, VLAN ID, and site names for stretched clusters.

Azure Local is built on proven technologies, including Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct, and the core Azure Management service. Each instance consists of 1 to 16 physical machines, all sharing common configurations and resources through Windows Server Failover Clustering.

Azure Local is validated hardware from a trusted hardware partner, running on the Azure Stack HCI OS. This setup provides Hyper-V-based compute resources and Storage Spaces Direct-based virtualized storage.

You can deploy Windows and Linux virtual machines as Arc-enabled servers, and even use Azure Virtual Desktop. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is also enabled by Azure Arc, making it easy to deploy AI and machine learning workloads.

Here are some of the key features and benefits of Azure Local:

This setup ensures a consistent experience across on-premises and cloud infrastructures, with seamless integration with Azure services like Microsoft Entra ID and Azure Monitor.

Microsoft recommends purchasing Premier Solutions from hardware partners to provide the best experience for Azure Local solution.

You can run Azure Local on Validated Nodes, which offer a basic building block for HCI systems, giving customers more hardware choices.

Browse the Azure Local Catalog to view Azure Local solutions from Microsoft partners such as ASUS, Blue Chip, DataON, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, HPE, Hitachi, Lenovo, NEC, primeLine Solutions, QCT, and Supermicro.

Some Microsoft partners offer a single point of contact for implementation and support services.

Azure Stack HCI offers several flexible management options, making it easier to deploy and manage your infrastructure. You can use the Windows Admin Center to simplify IT deployments.

The Azure Portal is another option for managing Azure Stack HCI components, which is ideal for organizations already using Azure cloud services. This way, you can leverage your existing cloud footprint and expertise.

If you're familiar with PowerShell, you can use it to create programmatic and script deployment and management tasks. This is especially useful for larger organizations that need to scale their Azure Stack HCI footprint quickly.

Azure Stack HCI also supports Deployment Scripts, which provide advanced deployment automation options. This can be a huge time-saver for administrators who want to automate repetitive tasks.

If you're already invested in virtualization solutions like VMWare Center or System Center, you can use those tools to manage your Azure Stack HCI components. This can be a cost-effective way to migrate your organization's infrastructure into the cloud.

To deploy Azure Stack HCI, you'll need some basic information, including:

Deploying Azure Stack HCI requires some basic information, which includes server name, domain name, computer account names, organizational unit (OU), static IP address, RDMA networking, VLAN ID, and site names for stretched clusters.

To deploy Azure Stack HCI, you'll need to gather this information and follow a series of steps. These steps include initial setup, cluster creation, Azure registration, and integrating with existing systems.

The initial setup involves installing Windows on each node and configuring the networking. You'll also need to run the Azure HCI OS setup wizard to begin the installation.

Cluster creation is done using Windows Admin Center, where you'll create the cluster and validate the configuration.

Azure registration requires registering the created clusters with Azure and setting up Azure Arc for management.

Integrating with existing systems involves configuring Azure hybrid services and installing Azure monitoring and management tools. You'll also need to connect systems with pre-existing on-prem systems.

Here's a summary of the steps to deploy Azure Stack HCI: