Flo Fox

With Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions becoming more common, many customers are now concerned with building clusters on top of those environments. In this article, I’ll explain how to build a guest HCI cluster and why traditional approaches don’t work. In the past, customers built redundancy and resilience based on virtualization and Storage Area Networks…

In this article, I will give you an overview of Azure Stack HCI 23H2, which is currently in preview. With the release of 23H2, Microsoft is adding a lot of customer-requested features and enhancements. So, let’s dive in!   When will Azure Stack HCI 23H2 be released (general availability)? The most pressing question I get…

As Azure Stack HCI becomes more widely deployed in datacenters and at the edge, I would like to highlight some frequently asked questions I have encountered during the last few months on Azure Stack HCI network requirements. Azure Stack HCI Network Requirements This series will focus on frequently asked questions about Azure Stack HCI and…

As Azure Stack HCI becomes more common in datacenters and at the network edge, I would like to highlight some frequently asked questions I have encountered during the last few months about software and Azure Stack HCI antivirus. Does Microsoft support third-party software on Azure Stack HCI? In general, you can say “Microsoft does not…

Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft’s hyper-converged infrastructure cluster solution for hosting virtualized Windows and Linux workloads. In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about the network components and hardware required to run virtualized workloads on-premises with Azure Stack HCI. How to select the correct network components for Azure Stack HCI Before…

It’s been more than a month since Azure Stack HCI version 22H2 became generally available. With this latest update for Microsoft’s hyper-converged infrastructure cluster solution, there are some significant changes in storage network capacity and network equipment requirements. In this article, I would like to give you a quick overview of the changes IT pros…

When planning for an Azure Stack HCI environment, many organizations may struggle to decide if they should go for a large Azure Stack HCI cluster or plan for smaller, use-case-specific clusters. Today, I would like to detail the ups and downs of both solutions. To do that, I’ll be discussing the required initial investments, maintenance…

While working with customers using Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI solution, I often hear concerns about the security, identity management, and Internet access aspects of this platform. In this article, I’m going to detail a methodology allowing IT pros to make their Azure Stack HCI environment more secure by creating a fabric domain and network. More…

In this article, I will explain what are affinity and anti-affinity rules and how to use them with Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server Hyper-V. If you’ve been using other hypervisors, you may already be familiar with affinity and anti-affinity rules, which are used to define the relationship between virtual machines and hosts. What are…

When you virtualize an Azure Stack HCI cluster, you may want to load balance applications running on it to optimize server utilization. While there are various built-in options to do that, they may be quite limited depending on your usage scenarios. In this article, I’ll discuss the various options you have to implement Azure Stack…