And now, a short and sweet one – once you have downloaded, installed and registered your ASDK, you can finally start using it!
First thing I would do is to grab something from the Azure Marketplace – inside your Admin Portal (https://adminportal.local.azurestack.external/), you can open up the Marketplace management section and then click on Add from Azure button:
This gives you a whole selection of images available on Azure, which can be downloaded and used on you ASDK. Just for fun, in the next video, I’ll download WordPress (on Ubuntu) and a VM extension called Microsoft Antimalware (hmmm… I wonder what it does? ):
Once downloaded, you can provision yourself a brand new WordPress instance, running on top of Ubuntu, on top of your own ASDK, as you can see in the following video:
As a final preparation step (following my previous post) in using the ASDK, we need to first register it. For that, an Azure subscription is required!
So… let’s do it.
First, we need to make sure we have the required Azure Stack PowerShell modules. It’s also convenient to make the PSGallery trusted repository for installation of the modules, if we need to install them. Then we can download all the tools we’ll need, and finally register our (connected) ASDK environment, using the following commands:
In my previous post, I’ve discussed how you can get your hands on the Microsoft Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) – now, I’ll show you how to install it.
As I’ve mentioned there already, we will install the ASDK inside of a Hyper-V virtual machine with nested virtualization enabled (a scenario that is not officially supported, but will give you an opportunity to work with ASDK in your lab, if you don’t have all the required hardware).
Internet/NTP access (time is important!) through a single network adapter (without proxy!)
Once you’ve downloaded and extracted the ASDK bits, you’ll get the CloudBuilder.vhdx file, which we will use for the boot disk of our newly created virtual machine.
But first, we will expand it a bit (I’ve expanded it to 200GB). Don’t forget to expand the partition inside as well!
Then, we can create a new (Generation 2) virtual machine with the following settings, our CloudBuilder.vhdx attached as the first disk and four freshly created data disks:
One other thing we need to ensure is to enable nested virtualization for this virtual machine (allowing us to run Hyper-V inside this virtual machine):
And now we are ready to start our virtual machine, hosting the ASDK.
Once started, virtual machine will finish its configuration (specialization phase of Windows installation), so let it finish and then configure password, computer name and IP address.
After this initial configuration, we configure the NTP settings by using the following:
Now we are ready to use the asdk-prechecker.ps1 script, to check if everything is OK:
And…. we are ready for the installation!
Now we need to run the asdk-installer.ps1 script, which will actually start the wizard which will help with entering the required IP adresses and checking the network connection – as a result, we will get the final commands to kick-off the installation:
One more thing needs to be configured for our virtual ASDK installation to succeed inside in nested enviroment – when the extraction process starts, we need to edit the C:\CloudDeployment\Roles\PhysicalMachines\Tests\BareMetal.Tests.ps1 file by changing the every “-not $IsVirtualizedDeployment” to “$IsVirtualizedDeployment” (that is, remove the “-not“):
Final thing to do is to wait for the whole process to complete (~4,5 hours on my hardware), and the result looks like this:
And there is another (shortened) video of the installation process:
So… you’ve heard all about the “hybrid clouds” (all around us), and you’ve finally decided to go with the truly hybrid one – the one from Microsoft, which consists of Microsoft Azure, extended to Microsoft Azure Stack on-premises.
If you are just starting and want to learn about it, you may find it difficult (and rather costly) to obtain the fully integrated OEM solution for your lab. But, there is a solution – Microsoft provides the development kit (ASDK), which can be used for playing around, learning and development (of course).
First, I recommend you to read through the requirements, and then you can run the prerequisites check script, just to double-check you have all that is needed. Don’t forget that, with hardware, you’ll also need an Azure subscription!
Script should give you output similar to mine (note that I’m using the virtual machine as my “ASDK host” and will be nesting all of it inside Hyper-V, of course):
If everything is fine, you’re ready to download the ASDK, using the provided downloader:
Download of ~12 GB may take a while, so “Please sit back and relax…” (as during the Windows 98 installation, some time ago).
The last step is to unpack the downloaded ADSK binaries (actually, the CloudBuilder.vhdx, as you’ll see):
There is also a short video to help you with the first steps inside the “brave new ASDK world”:
In my next post, I’ll show you how to prepare a Hyper-V virtual machine for hosting the ASDK – not the most performing environment, but it’s ‘good enough for a simple lab, if you don’t have the hardware one.
Great news coming from Microsoft – we are so close to finally getting the Microsoft Azure Stack preview! But… not this calendar year, unfortunately.
Azure Stack will be a combination of Windows Server 2016, Azure Pack and Azure Service Fabric. Combined together, these components will deliver the new “private cloud” solution (or more precisely hybrid solution because you will be able to expand with “public cloud” resources, if needed), which looks and feels like the “big Azure”. Bottom line is that the experience using Azure Stack or Azure will be identical (i.e. Microsoft brings it’s Azure to our on-premises datacenter). Sounds cool!
Microsoft released a “teaser” with hardware requirements for its Azure Stack, and who better to explain them than Jeffrey Snover himself. Enjoy this short video.
And the best thing of the whole video is that you’ll need only ONE standard server to host the Azure Stack. One to rule them all.
Don’t forget to take a look at the official announcement here (and to purchase additional server if needed, so that you can play with Azure Stack Preview once it gets available).
One question that I get rather frequently: “How much would running my machines on top of Microsoft Azure really cost me?” (or something similar).
Well, you probably know that the first answer that comes to mind is “It depends.” (probably can be used on any occasion in IT, what do you think? ). I hope that the next step is “Well, let’s take a look what do have, what do you really use, what can be migrated, let’s profile the usage, and then we will calculate it (using Excel, of course), and…”.
The tool itself looks very nice, and it’s easy to use (do I need to mention that this tool is also free?), so I really can’t think of a reason not to use it (or just give it a try). It also downloads the updated XML that verifies that the latest version is installed and that the latest pricing is used.
You can download this great tool here (it’s about 3,5 MB in size), with walkthrough here.
If it says that Microsoft Azure maybe is not right for you (based on the data you fed it with), you can still take a test-drive of Microsoft Azure, and decide for yourself (after all – it is a tool, it can be wrong ).
Well, for anyone who’s been asking when will it be available, it finally is – as of today, you can activate Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium trial!
click on the directory on which you want to activate trial (or create a new one)
go to licenses section
click on the TRY AZURE ACTIVE DIRECTORY PREMIUM NOW link
after a few moments, trial with 100 licenses will be activated and it will stay active for 90 days
How cool is that???
UPDATE (July 1st, 2014): You can read more about it here. There is also a new, long-awaited feature, AAD Tenant Deletion, and you can find more about it here.
Have a great week ahead!
P.S. If you still don’t have Microsoft Azure (trial or the “paid version”), you can acquire it here.
Not so long ago (just before the WinDays14 conference in Croatia), I’ve written an article about Windows Azure Backup (now called Microsoft Azure Backupbecause of a renaming scheme that followed little after the article was sent to be published). This article was written for the special, conference edition of Mreža magazine.
Unfortunately (for some), this article is in Croatian.
In general, it’s a 2 page Microsoft Azure Backup overview – what can it do, how easy it is to set-up, how it can ease the burden of doing backups, how can it be incorporated into the current backup policy and extend it off-premise, etc.
You can find and read the article using the specialized Windows 8/8.1 app called Bug & Mreža(or direct link) – app created for reading the digital editions of two of our largest IT magazines, Bug and Mreža).
With weekend just around the corner, maybe now is the right time to try Microsoft Azureand, more specifically, the Microsoft Azure Backup feature?
Have a great weekend!
UPDATE (June 14th, 2014): This article was re-published in Mreža magazine, “regular” (not WinDays) edition, July 2014. Makes me proud. Again.
):
). I hope that the next step is “Well, let’s take a look what do have, what do you really use, what can be migrated, let’s profile the usage, and then we will calculate it (using Excel, of course), and…”.
