The Azure Stack Hub ASDK is very useful for learning Azure Stack Hub and getting a general idea of how it works and how it differs from Azure Global. It does have its limitations, and is not suitable for any kind of production workload. Most people do not have a physical server laying around which can accommodate the heavy infrastructure needs of the ADSK. It is possible to nest the entire thing within an Azure VM, with that said, most people don't have access to an Azure subscription with no spending limit either.
The Azure VM SKU selected below is Standard_E32s_v3 which has 32 vCPUs and 96GB of memory. This SKU also supports the ability to run nested virtualization.
- Open Azure Shell from the Portal - setting PowerShell as the language of choice.
- Run Find-Script Deploy-AzureStackonAzureVM | Install-Module -Force to install the module to deploy a suitable VM to host the ASDK.
- From here run Deploy-AzureStackonAzureVM -ResourceGroupName myResourceGroup -Region 'West Europe' -VirtualMachineSize 'Standard_E32s_v3
- Once the VM is deployed, RDP to it and open Powershell ISE as an Administrator.
- Run cd C:\CloudDeployment to change directory.
- Run .\Install-AzureStackPOC.ps1 to kick off the deployment/install of ADSK.
By default the script will assume you want to deploy the ASDK in "connected" mode integrated with an Azure AD instance. During the first steps of the script you will be promoted to sign up to Azure AD. This is the instance which will be used to authenticate to this ASDK. Please note that the authentication mode cannot be changed, post deployment and a redeployment would be required.
***During the first steps of the script you will be prompted for a password - this should match the local admin password of the Azure VM.***
The local admin password of the Azure VM will eventually become the Domain Admin password for the AD DS domain which is created as part of the ASDK deployment. As part of the script a domain AZURESTACK is created.
The entire installation takes ~10h to complete and needs attention at various points throughout.
The script will run for approximately 3-4 hours and then the RDP connection to the VM will break. Hard reboot the VM from the Azure Portal and log back in via RDP.
As the script has not completed 100% at this point, we must rerun the script to ensure it picks up from where it left off.
To do this cd C:\CloudDeployment and run the .\Install-AzureStackPOC.ps1 -Rerun
Once it is completed, login to the Azure VM using AZURESTACK\azurestackadmin and the original Azure VM local admin password. You will then be able to launch Hyper-V Manager and see all the VM's which are running to make the ADSK operate.