Introduction
Before you explore Microsoft Azure Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) architecture and functionality, it's important to understand the technologies that serve as its underlying core components.
Contoso, Ltd. is a medium-size financial-services company with its headquarters in New York and branch offices across the United States. It's currently operating almost entirely on-premises, with most of its servers running either Windows Server 2012 R2 or one of several Linux distributions.
Contoso's IT director realizes that their organization has an outdated operational model with limited resiliency and hardware reaching end of life. The Contoso IT Engineering team is exploring the option of migrating some of the more critical workloads to Azure. However, because of regulatory and compliance constraints, migration isn't the best option in many cases. As the lead system engineer at Contoso, you suggest evaluating Azure Stack HCI as an alternative approach to modernize on-premises workloads, increase their resiliency, and streamline their operational model.
To convince the IT management of your approach, you need to first explore and document the characteristics and capabilities of Azure Stack HCI technologies. Then, implement a proof-of-concept environment that would help validate your suggestion.
In this module, you'll learn about the core Azure Stack HCI technologies, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Failover Clustering, Windows Server software-defined storage, and Windows Server software-defined networking (SDN).
Learning objectives
After completing this module, you'll be able to:
- Describe Hyper-V and its components.
- Describe Azure Stack HCI and its components.
- Describe software-defined storage.
- Describe software-defined networking.
Prerequisites
To get the best learning experience from this module, you should have knowledge of, and experience with:
- Hyper-V
- Azure Stack HCI
- Windows Server operating system management