My Little Azure Local Lab

(You will need a AD domain for now, there’s a Preview feature that will allow you to deploy with keyvault, more on that here. Also, ECC is needed, but these devices don’t support that, but there’s a work around. More on that under there….).

I needed a new lab…

I am the nerdiest of nerds. I had a VMWare lab in my living room…2 loud, obnoxious 1U rack mount servers, just laying on the side of my desk, that finally crapped out, an old HP 1920 switch that does it’s job, but the SFP Ports do not work….Since I am the man in the clouds, I was thinking, instead of paying A LOT OF MONEY for a cloud lab, why not leverage Azure Local, (formally known as Azure Stack HCI)? As I already have experience not only with Azure Local, but I have experience with the underlying components as well, Arc, Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct, it just made sense to go that route.

A house or a lab…questions to be pondered….

Well. Azure local has OEM support from HP, Lenovo, Dell, etc, however those are extremely expensive. Even the lower end side of the spectrum is a literal down payment on a house. This absolutely wasn’t going to work. Since I like to walk a thin line, I figured, if I could meet the requirements, I could get a cluster successfully deployed (TL;DR: I did). 

So I found this blog here which gave me an idea. So, instead of paying 90k for a lab, I was able to get it down to a much more manageable level. This blog is a bit outdated, but I was able to build upon this to get a cluster deployed.

I purchased everything needed from Amazon, and I don’t get their logistical process, but one day I had my entire porch covered with boxes. 

When you are buying things, make sure your switch supports 10Gig, if not you will need one. 

Let’s go shopping!

Here is the List of everything I got and yes YOU need to put it together. First these Minis forum Mini pcs are amazing. Better than the NUCs and cheaper. I looked into the NUCs, but they didn’t include a PCIe slot, which is needed for a 25Gig card for your storage network (more on that later).

2x Mini Forums MS-01 Barebone Machines. These come with 10GB nics on board.
2x 96Gb Ram Kits (these are not ECC, but the PCs support these)
2x Mellonox Connect-X4 25GB nics
2x 1TB M.2 SSD These are for the boot drives on each. 
4x 2TB M.2 SSD These are for Data Storage. I am going to be upgrading these to 4TB
1x Switch with 10GB ports. I needed something with a few 10gb ports, this one has two, I am going to get one with more at some point. This model is small and really good. 

Hold up what about the 25GB stuff?

Good question. When creating the cluster you can select if you want it switched or switchless. In my scenario, I connected the 25gb Mellonox Nics together as I don’t have a 25gb switch. 

Sweet… It’s put together, what now?

Well…. If Azure Local is new to you, keep reading this blog, also check out this. The prereqs need to be met before the OS is even installed. It is very important that the Active directory environment is set up and ready before we deploy or we will fail. 

Everything is set up… OS Install now? 

Download the latest Azure Local OS from the Azure portal. Then I made a bootable USB drive by using my go to tool for this called Rufus. So when you are done burning the bootable drive, make sure you enter bios and tell it to boot from the USB drive. 

Cool, Azure Local OS is installed… Now what?

HOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLDDDDDDD Everything…. The out of the box drivers if applied will not work. The deployment will fail epically. AZLocal OS didn’t pick up all the drivers. So, all the drivers you need for AZLocal and Mellonox in this zip file. Expand the zip to a USB drive and mount it. The underlying OS is Windows Core and you can run the installer like normal. This will install all nic and storage drivers needed. Once this is done, configure the NIC for the 10gb. Then you will need to do two more things: 1. Enable RDP and 2. Give the 10GB nic the IP Address. You will not use the 2gb nics, and the 25gb nics will be connected. together. DO NOT join these to the domain OR update these. The deployment will fail. You will need to register each node so they can get the arc agents.

$SubID =””
$Name=””
$Region=””
$TenantID=””

register-AzStackHCI -SubscriptionId $SubID -ComputerName $Name -Region “$Region -TenantId ” $TenantID

Go into the Azure portal and follow the wizard to deploy the cluster.

Your Deployment will fail, but don’t fret.

ECC Ram is a hard requirement. When it gets to that point on the validation it will fail with an error about Non-Supported ram. This is how you work around that:

On Node 1 get into powershell and run the following:  notepad C:\NugetStore\AzStackHci.EnvironmentChecker.Deploy.1.2100.3000.664\content\Roles\EnvironmentValidator\role.xml
– Make the following change to line 37:

<Task RolePath=”Cloud\Infrastructure\EnvironmentValidator” InterfaceType=”ValidateHardware” />
Into

<Task RolePath=”Cloud\Infrastructure\EnvironmentValidator” InterfaceType=”ValidateSBEHealth” />

Sweet dude… It’s starting to deploy!

Go do something… Spend the day with your kids, go check out a game, go to bed… 4+ hours later you will have a cluster to do things on… There are some other things to do like creating the network, setting up Images for deployment. I will have more on these topics at a later time.