Installing Azure Stack HCI 23H2 in VMs (Part1)

Installing Azure Stack HCI on real hardware can be troublesome. Maybe your HW is not the latest greatest (e.g. no TPM v2 chip). Whatif you could try first to get familiar with the inputs, timings. Seeing is believing. A virtual environment can help to get yourself familiar and save a lot of time.
Part 1:
See how you can setup the starting point for an AzStack HCI 23H2 installation on demo hardware within less than 1h using the code in:
github.com/bfrankMS/CreateHyp...
00:02:00 - Download CreateHypervVMs (AzStack HCI) from github
00:04:50 - Downloading AzStack HCI .iso file
00:06:00 - Converting the .iso to a bootable .vhdx
00:10:00 - Customizing config files (for CreateHypervVMs)
00:23:10 - Kick off the VM deployment
00:26:39 - VMs are ready.
00:26:39 - Checking if setup worked (ping test)
00:30:44 - Proof that Hyper-V role is installed inside VM
00:31:21 - Enable VlanIDs on the storage adapters
00:32:50 - Register servers with Azure Arc
00:40:32 - Prepare Active Directory for Azure Stack HCI
00:45:30 - Assign required permissions for deployment
Part 2:
Will demonstrate the AzStack HCI 23H2 installation inside the prepared virtual machines.
• Installing Azure Stack...

[@anthonydelagarde3990]

Thank you for the video and information. Great presentation.

[@thehybridfriends]

Glad it was helpful!

[@marcfritz-w2q]

So first thanks for this video! I am currently trying to follow it and was able to deploy the DC and the two HCI VMs. But for the DC I had to create the Golden Image from a standard Windows Server 2022 ISO as the Image Index 4 is not available for the Azure Stack HCI image. Checked with "dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:M:\sources\install.esd" and only got one result:
Index : 1
Name : Azure Stack HCI
Description : This option installs Azure Stack HCI.
Size : 9,526,906,146 bytes
After creation I was able to connect to the DC VM and had to "do it later" at the license key screen. After that I was able to login and figured out that the IP settings in 3_PostInstallScript.psd1 have not been used. The DC VM got a DHCP address from that network (was available via network tho). When I tried to change the IP Windows mentioned an error that has to be fixed with reboot. After that the two network adapters had default names and just DHCP.
So some questions about that:
1) Could it be that the Azure Stack HCI ISO has changed since you made that video? Filename is 25398.469.231004-1141.zn_release_svc_refresh_SERVERAZURESTACKHCICOR_OEMRET_x64FRE_en-us.iso
2) Should your script also work with default Windows images? If so what could be the reason that the network settings haven't been used?
3) Why do I need the DC VM in the first place?
Would be very happy about a reply,
Best regards,
Marc

[@thehybridfriends]

Hi Marc,
To your questions:
1) The image has not changed for quite a while now - so it should work. This .iso however is only for HCI so it e.g. does not contain a regular Win Server image.
2) Yes. The mechanisms are quite old i.e. using unattend.xml file inside a generalized windows image. I tried Win client and server OS.
3) pls have a look at the additional descriptions made at:
github.com/bfrankMS/CreateHypervVms/tree/master/Scenario-AzStackHCI
The pictures there should help to better understand the setup and the purpose of the e.g. DC.
Basically its providing 4 important things: A gui to manage HCI, AD Domain services, DNS resolution and routing of the internal HCI hosts to the internet via your gateway.
The when you see the product key screen then not all steps could be performed automatically - i.e. no surprise that additional steps are failing (e.g. nic renaming + IPs not set,...)
-> when you select the windows server iso to create the VHDX from (and yes you need to take a separate windows server iso - as it is not in the HCI iso)
-> you can either take an eval copy (requires no windows key) - which I did (www.microsoft.com/de-de/evalcenter) or take a regular win srv .iso file and provide a product key...the blueprint sample describes how to do it:
github.com/bfrankMS/CreateHypervVms/blob/master/Scenario-Blueprint/2_UnattendSettings.psd1
hth,
B

[@craigmcdonald1098]

great video - opened my eyes a bit. but seriously how can I see part 2 - the suspense is killing me.

[@thehybridfriends]

Part two will be published on Friday :)

[@piotrsocha1932]

Hello.
Thanks for the tutorial, but I'm stuck on the resolving external dns names from the hci hosts using the 192.168.0 network. DC working fine and resolve the names. Any ideas?

[@thehybridfriends]

Check that the DC has DNS installed. It uses the 8.8.8.8 as forwarder to resolve internet names. Maybe you need to change this (if your FW does not allow this.) to the DNS of the EXT interface.
On the HCI node. -> cmd.exe -> nslookup -> does it resolve to (192.168.0.1)? if not - what DNS settings did it get (ipconfig /all) ? if yes - can you resolve the domain hci00.org? if yes can you resolve ibm.com? If this does not help - pls open up a github issue on the repo and we'll troubleshoot from there.
hth,
B

[@piotrsocha1932]

Thansks for the answer. I ran the deployment again and I correct the execution policy to bypass. The problem was, that domain controller role was not installed and role with routing and DC was installed manually. Now it is working. Thanks again.