MAS

Windows Azure Pack Support

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Since the announcements and public previews of Microsoft Azure Stack (MAS), everybody including myself  is talking about and testing with MAS. But the reality is that a lot of companies have invested in Windows Azure Pack and were a little surprised that Microsoft announced before this summer that Windows Azure Pack on Windows Server 2012 R2 is supported until July 2017.

azurepacksupport

Several weeks ago Microsoft made another announcement that they are continue to invest and support in Windows Azure Pack (WAP) next to Azure Stack for 11 years! But to use the extended support you need to bring your Azure Pack environment to Windows Server 2016. MAS release is aimed for the summer of 2017 so very likely there will be a gab between end of support of WAP on Server 2012 R2 and any public available MAS appliances from HP, Dell or Lenovo…

From several customers i received questions about the support statement and what needs to be updated. Turns out it’s not that well documented and known. As you can see in the screenshot above, it states Windows Azure Pack (on Windows Server 2012 R2) and Windows Azure Pack (on Windows Server 2016). But as we all know, Windows Azure Pack is a solution based on lots of components from the Windows and the System Center family.

What to upgrade

As i said before Windows Azure Pack leans on a lot of Windows features like a Active Directory domain, IIS and Hyper-V but also on System Center components like VMM and SPF.

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Azure Stack TP2 November refresh

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Last week Microsoft published a new release of Microsoft Azure Stack TP2. This release included support for features like SQL RP, MySQL and Azure App Services so a bunch of PaaS services.

First it though yeah.. new features 🙂 !! But then I looked back and though.. o man this is gonna cost me a lot of deployment time again. Considering the previous issue’s I had before which you can read on this blog.

After downloading, extracting, copying and processing (which you can read all about here) i executed my deployment last night (my hosts are in a different time zone, so my last night was not yet server night 🙂 ).

azurestacktp2novemberdeploy

This morning I checked my server to see what the deployment did and I was pleasantly surprised

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Azure Stack TP2 Deployment Issue step 0.20

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Last week i finally got my first Azure Stack TP2 deployment completed after weeks of error’s as a blogged before.  After that i needed to redeploy several times and ran into different issue’s every time.

This time it stopped at step 0.20. After retrying the deployment with:


Invoke-EceAction -RolePath Cloud -ActionType Deployment -Start 0.20 -Verbose

It stopped at the same error. See below for te error message.

2016-11-08 20:45:06 Verbose  VMs to create: MAS-BGPNAT01
2016-11-08 20:45:06 Verbose  Updating management nodes for HyperConverged deployment.
2016-11-08 20:45:12 Verbose  Skipping deployment of the VM named 'MAS-BGPNAT01'. It is accessible via remote Powershell.
2016-11-08 20:45:12 Verbose  Waiting for the following VMs to be remotely accessible: MAS-BGPNAT01.
2016-11-08 20:45:13 Verbose  The VM 'MAS-BGPNAT01' has successfully started.
2016-11-08 20:45:15 Error    Task: Invocation of interface 'Deployment' of role 'Cloud\Fabric\VirtualMachines' failed:
Function 'Add-GuestVMs' in module 'Roles\VirtualMachine\VirtualMachine.psd1' raised an exception:
The WS-Management service cannot process the request because the XML is invalid.
at Wait-VMPSConnection, C:\CloudDeployment\Roles\VirtualMachine\VirtualMachine.psm1: line 1683
at Add-GuestVMs, C:\CloudDeployment\Roles\VirtualMachine\VirtualMachine.psm1: line 265
at <ScriptBlock>, <No file>: line 18
2016-11-08 20:45:15 Verbose  Step: Status of step '(NET) Deploy BGP VM' is 'Error'.
2016-11-08 20:45:15 Error    Action: Invocation of step 0.20 failed. Stopping invocation of action plan.
2016-11-08 20:45:15 Verbose  Action: Status of 'Deployment-Phase0-DeployBareMetalAndBGPAndNAT' is 'Error'.

The MAS-BGPNAT01 VM was accessible and i didn’t notice any errors in relation to the error above in the eventlogs. After a reboot of the MAS-BGPNAT01 VM I started the deployment from step 1, without the -start parameter:

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Azure Stack TP 1.1 Multi-Compartment Network Proxy Service

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Since Azure Stack TP 1.1 i have an issue deploying Azure Stack. After a while it fails with the error below:
MultiCompartmentNetworkProxyServiceError
Service 'Multi-Compartment Network Proxy Service (MultiCompartmentNetworkProxyS
ervice)' cannot be stopped due to the following error: Cannot stop MultiCompart
mentNetworkProxyService service on computer '.'.
    + CategoryInfo          : CloseError: (System.ServiceProcess.ServiceContro 
   ller:ServiceController) [Restart-Service], ServiceCommandException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CouldNotStopService,Microsoft.PowerShell.Command 
   s.RestartServiceCommand
    + PSComputerName        : xRPVM.AzureStack.local

I want to point out that i am not running all official requirement for the Azure Stack Deployment, since i am not booting from the included .vhdx file because i am a bit short on disk space. So this issue might not occur if you follow all the rules… 🙄

But since this issue took me a while to overcome and it’s the second time this happens I though I write a quick blog about it.

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Microsoft Azure Stack

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Yes! Last Friday the first public preview of Microsoft Azure Stack (MAS) TP1 was released. Twitter was going crazy and I saw a lot of downloads and deploys passing by. I was also blessed with some hardware from my company that meets the specs for an Azure Stack TP1 deployment.

So I can test and deploy MAS to! Whoohoe! 🙂

My physical host was installed with Windows Server 2016 TP4 and disabled all Nics but one. Installed all Windows updates including the specific KB3124262

After that run powershell as an admin. Give the powershell command and of you go!

DeployAzureStack.ps1 –verbose

Then after several reboots and hours of waiting the deployment has finished!

masdeploy

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