The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas: Day 1 - Centralized Management

On the first day of Azure Arc-Mas, Azure granted me: A Console in a Cloud Tree.

Single Control Plane Across Environments

Azure Arc is like the partridge in a pear tree at the heart of your environment’s management, extending the familiar Azure services to wherever your resources reside. It simplifies the complex, multi-faceted nature of modern IT landscapes by offering a unified management experience, enabling you to view and manage your resources irrespective of their physical or cloud location.

Introducing The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas: A Festive Journey Through Cloud Management

Happy Holidays, tech enthusiasts! 🎄 As we count down to the end of the year, I’m excited to bring you a special gift: “The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas.” This series is inspired by the classic carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” with a tech twist that celebrates the gifts Azure Arc delivers to IT professionals each day. This is a fun series that will be very high level. Depending on my response I may dig deeper into sections later this year.

The The Festive Tech Calendar is a free, month-long, fun tech event that takes place throughout December. The event features new content from different communities and people around the globe. The event is organized by Cloud Family and is aimed at people from all communities who want to participate in a fun and engaging session that is a bit different from a normal conference. On the 6th of December I did a session called “The 12 Days of Azure Arc-Mas.” The link to the video is below. If you are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (Texas), I will be doing a DFWSMUG Edition of this session as well at the Winter Meet up on December 14th!

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

I have decided to end this blog series but not end blogging about Azure Stack HCI. For those that don’t know, Azure Stack HCI 23H2 Preview has been released. The GA date isn’t officially published yet. However, I feel blogging about release 22H2 will be a mute point now with some of the major changes coming in release 23H2.

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

I now have Azure Stack HCI cluster deployed. We can manage it using Windows Admin Center or PowerShell. In later blogs I will go into how to us Azure Arc services to manage our workloads that we will deploy on our cluster. This blog I want to focus on deploying Azure Kubernetes Service and deploying an AKS host on my HCI cluster. This will enable my me to deploy Kubernetes clusters for various workloads later.

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

My last blog Azure Stack HCI - Part VII - Configure Windows Admin Center Access, was actually all about Windows Admin Center and nothing really about Azure Stack HCI. However, this blog is going to be focused on using Windows Admin Center for Azure (Preview) to manage our Azure Stack HCI clusters from anywhere without a VPN or a direct connection. So go get some coffee so I don’t put you to sleep.

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

So this blog, which I hope will be short, will be about how to secure your access to the Windows Admin Center that is being used to manage your Azure Stack HCI cluster. I will be honest, up until right before I just created this blog, I never really gave any thought to this. Well, maybe some thought but since I don’t really use WAC a lot, I never saw it as a need in my environment. Plus, I am the only one who has access to my lab environment anyway. (That I am aware of!)

For those that are not aware there is a very awesome resource provided by the Cloud Family called the Festive Tech Calendar. The Festive Tech Calendar is a free, month-long, fun tech event that takes place throughout December. The event features new content from different communities and people around the globe. The event is organized by Cloud Family and is aimed at people from all communities who want to participate in a fun and engaging session that is a bit different from a normal conference. This project was originally started by two amazing guys, Gregor Suttie and Richard Hooper. If you don’t follow them on X or LinkedIn, I highly recommend to do so!

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

The last few blogs I have talked about deploying a single-node cluster and then how to scale that single-node cluster to a two-node cluster, then again on how to add a third-node and more to that existing cluster. We also did everything in PowerShell. This blog will be my last blog on how to deploy an Azure Stack HCI cluster but I wanted to show how to do it using Windows Admin Center.

In this blog series I plan to blog about everything I know about Azure Stack HCI. So, it should be a very short blog series. Just kidding. Again, I tend to blog about subjects that I am currently working on or will be currently working on. So, Azure Stack HCI is fresh on my mind again these days.

The last three or so blogs I have talked about deploying a single-node cluster and then how to scale that single-node cluster to a two-node cluster. This blog I want to share my experience about scaling my Azure Stack HCI cluster to a three-node cluster and more. The over all process is fairly the same as scaling out a one-node to a two-node cluster. However, there are some differences that I wanted to call out. So instead of actually walking through the scale out process, I will discuss the differences between scaling out to a two-node cluster to three-nodes or more.