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Fabio Hara edited this page Jun 23, 2016 · 5 revisions

Instructions for setup

Hi guys!

I finished my lab environment with Azure Stack Technical Preview using my “small” machine. This is not for hard tests but at least allows to study and better understand how Azure Stack works. Please do not recommend this setup for production.

  1. Hardware and Software required I don’t have a huge server as described in Azure Stack site (96GB RAM, etc) but I bought a small (and portable) computer:
  • Intel NUC – 1 Core i5 quad-core processor (Skylake)
  •  32GB RAM DDR4

  •  1 mSATA 250GB + 1 SSD 240GB

  •  mSATA = OS

  •  SSD = Virtual Disks

  •  1 gigabit Ethernet + 4 USB3 + Intel Iris Graphics

I installed Windows Server 2016 TP4 w/ Nested Virtualization. This is important due the requirement of 3 physical disks to deploy the PoC. I created one virtual machine with 28GB RAM and I deployed the Azure Stack environment inside. This virtual machine must use 1 VHD (allocated in mSATA) and 3 other VHDs (Dynamic disk w/ 250GB allocated in SSD disk). You can’t use iSCSI because the setup allows only one Ethernet adapter. The setup script change the IP address during the deployment of the environment and you lose contact with the iSCSI Target.

Also you need to install the hotfix KB312462 but you can’t do that through Windows Server (due to browser restrictions). Download this fix using an Windows 7/8/10 machine.

  1. Scripts There is one VHD (MicrosoftAzureStackPOC.VHDX) that you need to mount and change the scripts to support this demo environment

  • Open X:\AzureStackInstaller\PoCDeployment\Invoke-AzureStackDeploymentPrecheck.ps1 (X = drive letter mounted) using PowerShell ISE:

    Line 62 This line is used to setup the required disks (3 physical disks). You don’t need to change this line (just for your information) because USB or VHD (mounted) not worked here.

    Line 98 This is the line that defines the required memory for the physical server. You can change to 32 but do not use any physical server with less than 32GB RAM. I tried with 16GB of RAM (without nested virtualization) but I received a lot of errors during setup.

  • Open X:\AzureStackInstaller\PoCFabricInstaller\CreateVM.ps1 with PowerShell ISE ( X = drive letter mounted)

    Line 36 The parameter –MemoryStartupBytes define the amount of RAM for each virtual machine (the PoC create 10 VMs). I had used 2GB as a parameter for my demo environment You can remove the other 2 lines above

  • Open X:\AzureStackInstaller\PoCFabricInstaller\PoCFabricSettings.xml using NotePad and use CTRL+F to search XRPVM and edit the following parameter:

      <ProcessorCount>4</ProcessorCount>
  This parameter defines the amount of virtual processors for each virtual machine. The XRPVM Virtual Machine use  8 VPs and you need to change this.

  1. Azure Active Directory

    The setup describes that you need an separate Azure AD. I created one separate domain and one account (like: admin@xptodomain.onmicrosoft.com) with Global Admin permission. Don’t forget to logon at least one time to change the initial password

The entire process will spend almost 5 to 6 hours. After that you may receive one error at the end of the script (something about status but you can ignore). Just wait almost 15minutes before logon (some background processes requires more time to finish).

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