On my previous blog post, I took you through the deployment of the Azure Stack development kit steps. after receiving several requests from my blog followers and readers, I recorded the steps on a series of four videos each less than ten min long to help you speed up with the Azure Stack deployment
for testing and learning purposes.
Introduction
In this introduction video, I will review the steps that you will cover during the deployment of the Azure Stack Development Kit. Also, I will discuss my expectations for this CloudOasis CloudCast series.
Virtual Machine Provisioning
In Part II of this Azure Stack Development Kit Proof of Concept (POC) deployment CloudCast, I will take you through the steps to create the Azure Cloud Virtual Machine that will be used to deploy the Azure Stack. I will go over the Azure VM size, Resizing the System Disk and adding an additional three disks.
Virtual Machine / Physical server Preparation
In Part III of the Azure Stack Development Kit POC deployment CloudCast, I will demonstrate for you the preparation of the Virtual Machine you will need to host the Azure Stack. I will then talk about and demonstrate, the installation of the pre-requisites Windows features, changing the user account, modifying the hardware minimum requirement check script, and more.
Installation of the Azure Stack
Finally, I will run the deployment script, and then run you through the installation process of the Azure stack development kit POC. Included in this final part of the demonstration will be some basic troubleshooting that you will almost certainly need.
My Feedback
The idea behind the Azure Stack is great, but I am still not a big fan of the way Microsoft constructs the deployment process. The processes used to deploy the Azure stack are very cumbersome and extremely complex. I faced many errors and issues during the deployment, and on each step, I had to Google(R) the issues to figure out the cause of the errors. This does not include the extra steps needed when the Azure Cloud VM kept failing during the deployment, even though I ran a deployment with the high-end VM that aligned much more closely with the MS hardware minimum recommendations.
It does work, I have been able to see the Azure Stack deployed successfully twice. Unfortunately, neither of those instances were for the creation of this blog post, meaning that video four of this post is not complete due to the failure of the Azure Cloud VM. After two weeks, I gave up. The steps are the correct steps, and they are in the right order; but for whatever reason, Azure Cloud keeps running off the tracks. The good news is, however, is that I have acquired some good hardware, and hopefully, I will be able to complete the last ten minutes of the demonstration with this new machine. Until then, my apologies for the incomplete video; it was beyond my control.
Conclusion
I hope the steps I just have demonstrated will help you speed up the deployment, and you can get on with spending your time learning and testing and not troubleshooting the deployment. To prepare these videos, I went through a very complex and challenging time that included many failures. Primarily, the failures were with the preparation of video number four, which took two weeks to complete. The issues were mainly due to the limitations of the Azure Stack deployment kit POC script. From these videos, I learnt a lot about the Azure Stack, and in my next two series, I will discuss the initial configuration. I will then move on to the steps you will need to protect the Azure Stack using Veeam Backup and Replication. Till then, thanks for visiting my blog, and I hope you can share your feedback and share my blog with others.
