HCI Box on a Budget. Leverage Azure Spot & Hyrbrid Use Benefits. Up to 93% savings.

Do you want to take HCI Box for a test drive but dont have $2,681 in the budget? Me either. How about the same box for $178?

This is the price for 730 hours

Following general instructions from jumpstart Azure Arc Jumpstart

once you have the git repo, edit the host.bicep file

...\azure_arc\azure_jumpstart_hcibox\bicep\host\host.bicep

add to the properties for the host virtualMachine the resource vm 'Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines@2022-03-01'

priority: 'Spot'
    evictionPolicy: 'Deallocate'
    billingProfile: {
        maxPrice: -1
    }

You can review difference regions for either cheaper price per hour or lower eviction rate

0.24393 per hour * 730 hours = $178

If you are elegable for Hybrid Use Benefits through you EA or have licenses you can also enable HUB in the Bicep template under virtual machine properties

licenseType: 'Windows_Server'

Code changes

...
resource vm 'Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines@2022-03-01' = {
  name: vmName
  location: location
  tags: resourceTags
  properties: {
    licenseType: 'Windows_Server'
    priority: 'Spot'
    evictionPolicy: 'Deallocate'
    billingProfile: {
        maxPrice: -1
    }
...

Good luck, enjoy HCI’ing

Interesting changes to Arc Agent 1.34 with expanded detected properties

Microsoft just pushed out a change in Azure Arc Connected Agent 1.34 and with this comes some enrichment of Hybrid Servers detected properties.

This is what the properties looked like prior to the update.

Agent 1.33 and earlier

Okay… so what’s new and different?

New detected properties for Azure Arc Connected Agent 1.34

serialNumber, ProcessNames and totalPhysicalMemory

resources
| where ['type'] == "microsoft.hybridcompute/machines" 
| extend processorCount = properties.detectedProperties.processorCount,
    serialNumber = properties.detectedProperties.serialNumber,
    manufacturer= properties.detectedProperties.manufacturer,
    processorNames= properties.detectedProperties.processorNames,
    logicalCoreCount = properties.detectedProperties.logicalCoreCount,
    smbiosAssetTag = properties.detectedProperties.smbiosAssetTag,
    totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes = properties.detectedProperties.totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes,
    totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes = properties.detectedProperties.totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes
| project name,serialNumber,logicalCoreCount,manufacturer,processorCount,processorNames,totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes,totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes

This unlocks organizations to collect processor, serial number and memory information in a simple fashion via Azure Arc infrastructure. This can be used to look at things like consolidation and migration planning, perhaps decommissioning aging hardware even warranty lookup if you don’t have current hardware CMDB.

The process cannot access the file psconfig.json because it is being used by another process

If you have been having issues deploying Azure Arc Resource Bridge on AKS and running into various issues like the one above for Azure Stack HCI. Microsoft has recently published new guidance. Some pages still have conflicting messaging. I hope this pointer might help someone else.

We do NOT recommend or support running AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc Resource Bridge on the same Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server cluster. If you have AKS on Azure Stack HCI installed, run Uninstall-AksHci and start deploying your Azure Arc Resource Bridge from scratch.

Microsoft Learn Reference

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/hybrid/troubleshoot-aks-hybrid-preview#issues-with-using-aks-hci-and-azure-arc-resource-bridge