Introduction
Microsoft Azure Stack HCI integrates with a range of Azure services to enhance its existing operational and business continuity capabilities. This integration also helps simplify the process of establishing hybrid connectivity to Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS)-based workloads.
Bridging the technology gap
Contoso Ltd. is a medium-size financial-services company located in New York. Until recently, Contoso was operating almost entirely on-premises. Operational overhead was a significant challenge because of lack of automation and reliance on outdated technologies. Legacy hardware and software resulted in frequent stability and performance issues. These issues exposed insufficient high availability and disaster recovery provisions.
To modernize its environment, Contoso IT started exploring Microsoft software-defined datacenter technologies. Contoso's Chief Information Officer (CIO) asked you, the lead system engineer, to evaluate how Azure Stack HCI can help change Contoso's IT landscape.
Meanwhile, Contoso IT staff migrated some of on-premises workloads to a range of Azure IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) services. During this migration, it became clear that Azure offers extra benefits in the Azure Stack HCI environment.
Given the increasingly hybrid nature of Contoso's environment, you decide to explore Azure technologies that can bridge the gap between the administrative model of the on-premises and cloud services. You want to test these technologies with Azure Stack HCI to determine whether they can help further enhance its operational capabilities, increase workload resiliency, and provide more visibility into its performance and stability.
To achieve this goal, you want to identify a way to integrate Azure Stack HCI with some of the cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure Monitor and Azure Backup, which Contoso has already implemented for its cloud-based IaaS deployments. You also want to determine the extent to which Azure Site Recovery can help with implementing a suitable disaster recovery solution. You are also interested in technologies that would help add connectivity to IaaS workloads running in Azure, in scenarios with cross-premises dependencies.
Learning objectives
At the end of this module, you'll be able to:
- Monitor Azure Stack HCI by using Azure Monitor.
- Protect Azure Stack HCI virtual machines (VMs) by using Azure Site Recovery.
- Protect Azure Stack HCI VMs by using Azure Backup.
- Implement Azure Network Adapter in Azure Stack HCI scenarios.
Prerequisites
Familiarity with:
- The key features of Windows Server
- The concept of virtualization
- Azure services, such as Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery
- The architecture, core capabilities, and primary use cases of Azure Stack HCI