What is Azure Stack HCI?

Azure Stack HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) is a robust solution that integrates Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs) or containerized workloads. It can do this with seamless connectivity to Microsoft Azure for enhanced cloud-based services, comprehensive monitoring, and streamlined management. 

This hybrid solution modernizes on-premises data centers by integrating them with cloud services for improved performance, scalability, and security.

How Azure Stack HCI works in cloud computing

With a hybrid cloud approach, your business can take control of its cloud journey, seamlessly integrating on-premises hardware with cloud services at a pace that suits your unique needs and timelines. This is thanks to seamless integration with Azure services like Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), Azure Monitor, Azure Backup, and more.

This integration ensures a consistent experience across on-premise and cloud infrastructures. You use the same management tools as an administrator across all your services. As a result, Azure Stack HCI is one of the fastest ways to get up and running with cloud computing.

This also means there can be significant cost savings when using Azure Stack HCI instead of making a hard switch from on-premise hardware to the cloud. At implementation time, you can use existing servers or commodity hardware, and then you can gradually move to cost-effective cloud solutions.

Beyond these benefits, Azure Stack HCI offers robust security features. With hyper-converged infrastructure, you can easily achieve virtual machine encryption and network micro-segmentation. Compared to implementing the same functionality in hardware, you can more easily manage HCI solutions and be more cost-effective.

How does Azure Stack HCI work?

Azure Stack HCI works by combining the functionality of traditional hardware elements (computing, storage, networking) into a single HCI solution with virtualization. On a practical level, you can administer all of these components through the Windows Admin Center.

Windows Admin Center is a web-based management console for managing a complete IT infrastructure. Since components like networking and storage are virtualized in an HCI environment, it’s much faster and less expensive to get up and running compared to the old ways of buying hardware, installing it, and maintaining it.

So, if an IT administrator wants to deploy a new instance of Microsoft SQL Server, creating a new virtual machine using storage from the Azure cloud is effortless. Similarly, you can quickly deploy a Docker application in a new Linux instance.

The tight integration with other Azure services simplifies the setup of other critical components, like authentication against Entra ID and defining network topology. With all the essential tasks of managing an IT environment available at a sysadmin’s fingertips, it empowers an organization to deploy new solutions rapidly.

Why choose Azure Stack HCI?

Azure Stack HCI offers a robust set of benefits that make it an excellent choice for organizations looking to modernize infrastructure and take advantage of hybrid cloud computing. Here are a few of the key benefits companies can expect to see:

• Hybrid cloud infrastructure: Offers seamless integration between on-premise infrastructure and cloud services, allowing organizations to maintain control over sensitive data while still taking advantage of cloud capabilities.
• Edge computing capabilities: Process data closer to the source, reducing latency and improving the performance of edge applications.
• Azure service integration: Get integration with various Azure services that make life easier, like Azure Backup, Azure Security Center, Azure Monitor, and others.
• Cost management and optimization: Allows organizations to use existing hardware to manage costs and a flexible pricing model that helps them grow into their cloud infrastructure.
• Robust security and compliance: Includes advanced security features like shielded virtual machines, encrypted networks, and Security Center integrations to help organizations protect their data and comply with regulations.
• Scalability and flexibility: Allows teams to easily scale their resource usage based on current needs and quickly adapt when the situation changes.
• Performance enhancements: Includes technology like Storage Spaces Direct and Software-Defined Networking to deliver high performance to both traditional and cloud environments.

The key features of Azure Stack HCI

HCI technologies greatly simplify security, scalability, and management. However, Azure Stack HCI’s hybrid cloud functionality makes it stand out from the crowd. 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 offers all the standard features of HCI solutions.

Virtualization

Two popular virtualization options Azure HCI offers are Hyper-V and containerization. Hyper-V allows for multiple virtual machines on the same server, while containerization allows teams to set up containerized workflows using the Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) and similar software.

Software-defined infrastructure

Azure HCI also allows organizations to use software to define the infrastructure for networking and storage, where the configuration is abstracted away from the underlying hardware. These features allow teams to change infrastructure in real-time and programmatically based on current needs without investing in new hardware, licenses, and other expenses.

Edge computing

Edge computing allows the deployment and management of workloads closer to data generation points, reducing system latency and performance. Azure HCI includes Azure Arc, allowing organizations to connect their management services to on-premise, edge, and cloud services.

Security

Azure HCI comes secure out of the box, including consistent Secure Boot, UEFI, and TPM settings. It also contains security features that make things easier:

• Windows admin security tool
• Device and credential guard
• Bitlocker and SMB encryption
• Windows Defender antivirus

Azure HCI also has resources to help organizations comply with security standards, including PCI, HIPPA, and FIPS. 

Simple management

Azure HCI offers an easy management portal for organizations to set up and modify their IT infrastructure. The Azure Portal gives an overview of HCI clusters, allowing teams to monitor systems at scale and manage Azure Services. Windows Admin Center is also available, giving teams the ability to manage individual virtual machines and edge services. Additionally, it provides many resources to collect resource metrics to see what resources your environment uses.

Performance optimization

Azure HCI offers many performance tools to help teams manage high-demand environments. It offers many solutions that help teams monitor performance across their infrastructure and increase performance. Some common performance tools available are high-performance disks for quick file access and data optimization and GPU partitioning for AI and machine learning jobs.

Azure Stack HCI management and deployment options

While the Windows Admin Center greatly simplifies IT deployments, Azure Stack HCI offers other flexible management options. Depending on your company’s existing cloud footprint and the abilities of your sysadmins, some of the other management and deployment options might be a better fit.

For example, organizations already using some Azure cloud services can use Azure Portal to manage their Azure Stack HCI components. Administrators experienced with Microsoft’s PowerShell can also use that environment to create programmatic and script deployment and management tasks. 

Azure Stack HCI supports a specialized form of scripts known as Deployment Scripts, which provide advanced deployment automation options. This can be especially handy for larger organizations that want to scale their Azure Stack HCI footprint faster.

Companies that invest in virtualization solutions can also utilize some of their preexisting tools, including VMWare Center and System Center. The ability to use the tools that administrators are already familiar with is another reason that Azure Stack HCI can be a cost-effective way to migrate your organization’s infrastructure into the cloud.

Deploying Azure Stack HCI

Deploying Azure HCI will require some basic information:

• Server name
• Domain name
• Computer account names
• Organizational unit (OU)
• Static IP address
• RDMA networking
• VLAN ID
• Site names (for stretched clusters)

Steps to deploy Azure Stack HCI

There are several steps to deploy Azure HCI once you make a plan and gather the data for deployment:

• Initial setup: Install Windows on each node and configure the networking. Run the Azure HCI OS setup wizard to begin the installation.
• Cluster creation: Use Windows Admin Center to create the cluster and validate the configuration.
• Azure registration: Register the created clusters with Azure and set up Azure Arc for management.
• Integrate with existing systems: Configure Azure hybrid services and install Azure monitoring and management tools. Connect systems with pre-existing on-prem systems.

Deployment best practices

Deploying Azure HCI may be complex, especially if you have a large deployment. Several best practices are available that will help ensure a smooth installation.

• Thoroughly plan the deployment, including the network infrastructure, storage requirements, and software requirements.
• Document the deployment process to ensure you can repeat it in the future.
• Create a small-scale deployment to test before deploying at scale.
• Keep all systems updated with patches before deployment.
• Verify the minimum server requirements and that all servers have the same make and model (64-bit Intel Nehalem or AMD EPYC, minimum 1.4 GHz, 32 GB of RAM per node, 4 GB of RAM per TB of cache, high-bandwidth, low-latency network connection).

Use cases for Azure Stack HCI

In addition to the ability to quickly roll out IT infrastructure and applications, Azure Stack HCI has an almost unlimited number of use cases.

You can use Azure Stack HCI to create private clouds that offer a company the benefits of cloud computing with the security of on-premise installations. This is especially important for regulated industries like finance and healthcare. HCI allows organizations to store data securely, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), financial data, and customer information.

You can also use it to make a high-performance computing cluster for demanding scientific and engineering applications by quickly creating virtual clusters. Doing this helps researchers create clusters to perform tasks like complex calculations, weather modeling, and genomic sequencing.

Azure HCI is also beneficial to any organization in the content distribution business. It can serve as the content delivery network, delivering text, images, and videos to customers worldwide using edge servers to manage delivery.

Adding remote offices to a corporate network with Azure Stack HCI is also easy. Using the Azure cloud as a bridge, remote workers can have the same experience as being on a corporate network, thanks to Azure Stack HCI’s virtualized networking solutions.

Azure Stack HCI is also well-suited to creating a DevOps environment for modern application development, testing, and deployment. It allows you to quickly deploy new apps and services and automate testing and debugging processes.

Learn more about Azure integrations

Are you ready to enhance your IT infrastructure by using Azure? Visit our Azure Monitoring Solutions page to learn more about how LogicMonitor can help you seamlessly integrate Azure with your current infrastructure.