Azure Stack finally made it to GA! There are some interesting changes i would like to share with the installation process. First of all a new installer has appeared and which makes our life much easier. For instance it does prepare the system before booting into the cloudbuilder.vhdx. Once into ASDK environment the installer will guide you through the installation process using a pretty straight forward UI. Multi Factor authentication and Microsoft accounts are now also supported.

Some additional changes to notice are regarding the resource providers. With technical previews we used to deploy our sql and mysql databases directly on the machines actually hosting these resource providers. From now on you need to deploy dedicated host servers to provide database capacity.

With all that of course comes also a new Azure Stack powershell module making it to version 1.2.10 and an updated version of azure stack tools .

Here is a quick overview of the new process assuming you have already downloaded ASDK sources :

First of all you need to download the installer here : https://github.com/Azure/AzureStack-Tools/tree/master/Deployment

You then need to run the installer on your deployment machine, you don’t need to bother patching this system since you will anyway boot into the cloudcruiser.vhdx.

Select Prepare Environment

Set the patch to your cloudbuilder.vhdx and notice the possibility to include your OEM drivers into the building process.

Set the administrator password that you will use for the ASDK host, a computername, timezone and if you are willing to use a static IP for your ASDK host.

Select the dedicated NIC that you are going to use for this host and don’t forget that only one NIC is supported in your deployment.

Specify your network settings.

At this stage your machine will reboot and starts by using the cloudbuilder.vhhx as operating system. Select reboot now.

At this point i would recommend to reconnect to your machine using ilo/idrac/etc.

Since this is a new Windows Installation and will be your host environment be sure that all your devices are properly discovered and installed. In my case i am using an HP HC250 system so i have a bunch of components to update. I’ll just use the SPP 2017 media from HP.

I will now reboot my host and kick off the ASDK installation. To do so i just need to launch again the asdk_installer.ps1 script after the reboot.

Notice that the script is now proposing to make an Install instead of preparing the environment. Select Install.

From this screen we can choose an ADFS deployment or Azure AD. In my case for this node i will go for Azure AD. Specify the administrator password that you have set during the prepare environment phase.

Select the NIC that you are going to use, all other will be disabled.

The BGPNAT machine is still there in ASDK in order to provide connectivity from the ASDK to the outside world. I am running a DHCP on that network but i do prefer to set an ip myself for the BGPNAT machine.

We can take note of the powershell command used if for some reason we want to redeploy without using the UI installer. I select Deploy.

After few minutes i get an azure authentication window to validate my Azure AD and create the requires resources.

From this point the installation will keep going for 3 to 4 hours.

Once the deployment is successfully finished we can see the status COMPLETE : Action Deployment.

Navigate to https://adminportal.local.azurestack.external/ to ensure that your installation is working.

You can now proceed with registration in order to enable syndication : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-stack/azure-stack-register

Once done you can start to use IaaS capabilities after downloading images from the market place or importing your own. If you plan to directly proceed with resource providers installation then you should first download Windows Server 2016 images and a SQL image such as SQL 2016 developer on Windows Server 2016.