Tag: hardware

Azure Stack: Hardware Requirements

In this year’s Ignite Conference Mark Russinovich, Jeffrey Snover and Jeremy Winter spoke about how to bring Azure to your datacenter and discussed platform vision and strategy . I’d recommend to watch entire video on the channel9 .

Microsoft has been working hard since that conference and yesterday Jeffrey Snover shared hardware requirements for Azure Stack Preview (check out the video and tables below).

azure_stack_hardware_requirements

Storage considerations
Data disk drive configuration: All data drives must be of the same type (SAS or SATA) and capacity.  If SAS disk drives are used, the disk drives must be attached via a single path (no MPIO, multi-path support is provided)
HBA configuration options:

  1.  (Preferred) Simple HBA
  2. RAID HBA – Adapter must be configured in “pass through” mode
  3. RAID HBA – Disks should be configured as Single-Disk, RAID-0
Supported bus and media type combinations

  • SATA HDD
  • SAS HDD
  • RAID HDD
  • RAID SSD (If the media type is unspecified/unknown*)
  • SATA SSD + SATA HDD**
  • SAS SSD + SAS HDD**

* RAID controllers without pass-through capability can’t recognize the media type. Such controllers will mark both HDD and SSD as Unspecified. In that case, the SSD will be used as persistent storage instead of caching devices. Therefore, you can deploy the Microsoft Azure Stack POC on those SSDs.

** For tiered storage, you must have at least 3 HDDs.
Example HBAs: LSI 9207-8i, LSI-9300-8i, or LSI-9265-8i in pass-through mode

Recommended SKUs : Dell PE R630 and HPE  DL360 G9

Links:

Azure Stack review on Microsoft site

Microsoft brings the Next Generation of Hybrid Cloud – Azure to Your Datacenter

Announcing the Microsoft Azure Stack

How to fix event ID 3112 “The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running.”?

1. Check if your CPU supports virtualization technology . Download CPU-Z and check instructions list for Intel VT-X or AMD-V.

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AMD-V on AMD Turion
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Intel-VTx

2. Check if virtualization enabled on your CPU (CPU Configuration, BIOS). For example, on Intel Sr1670HV Intel Virtualization Tech and Execute-Disable Bit Capability must be enabled. Usually, you have to just find settings (in CPU Configuration) that contains “Virtualization” or “Execution” and enable them.

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3. I had a problem with enabling hypervisor on my server and both (1,2) steps did not help me.Before it I have had an issue with OS loading, so I repared my server using bootrec.exe utility (/rebuildbcd and /fixboot parameters).  According with http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff542202(v=vs.85).aspx I checked my bcdedit (just type it into cmd) for the following parameter and noticed there were no one:

hypervisorlaunchtype [ Off | Auto ]

Controls the hypervisor launch options. If you are setting up a debugger to debug Hyper-V on a target computer, set this option to Auto on the target computer.

I solved it by running bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto. Restarted server and successfully started my VMs.

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