 Hi everybody, welcome to the latest episode of From the Rock the Cloud with me, your host Tom Hall. As you know, I'm not an expert on anything, but we try to get experts here to talk about all things cloud, server, on-prem, Azure, all of that goodness related, and boy have we got a special guest for you today, so we will get to him in a second. But today is, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on, there's a lot of things happening in the world, and Azure Stack HCI, it's a big topic, so we need a big personality to talk about. So, we've managed to get hold of a guest, like I said, I mentioned him, he's a pretty special guy. We've got my friend Sven all the way from Germany, from the Dak region here at Microsoft. So, Sven, if you could just introduce yourself to our lovely audience, maybe tell us who you are, what you do and a little bit about yourself, and then maybe we can get stuck into today's topic. Yes, of course. So, hello everyone. My name is Sven from Germany. I am working for Microsoft for around about 10 years. And for the whole 10 years, I'm focused on Windows Server. And yeah, now we have Azure Stack HCI, and it's wonderful that I could be in the role of an Azure Stack HCI expert for the Dak region, so Germany, Austria and Switzerland. So, it's my job to bring together all the relevant stakeholders from the OEM to the distributor, to the reseller, and from Microsoft all up. So, it's a very wonderful job, it's a very wonderful product, and it's wonderful to be in that show today. Brilliant. And Sven, before we just get into the topic at hand, now I know, because I work with you, so I know, that you also run the Dak server club. Now, if I'm right, you're thinking, how many members have you got in the German server partner club? It's not so easy to say, because we don't have an official registration page, but we have between 8,000 or 10,000 IT experts following us via LinkedIn, via YouTube, we're offering our readiness content. And prior to COVID-19, we had a lot of life events all across Germany. And for example, we launched Windows Server 2019, three years ago, and we had around about 250 people in one cinema, over six, seven locations all across Germany. Reaching them to do readiness was a really, really great opportunity to get in contact with partners. And now, due to COVID-19, it's only an online session, and you can watch it on YouTube, but it's a lot of people following us, because they need to understand the technique behind the product. So it's one thing to understand how to sell it, but there's another thing to deploy it and to manage it. And that's where we are focusing on. Brilliant. You're kind of like the Beyoncé of server, like you've got the biggest following in the server industry. And you're also launching OS's in cinemas. So it's like launching new Star Wars movies. I remember a few years ago when server was kind of like a real niche thing. Now it's just gone crazy. Everybody's loving it. So Sven, thank you for being with us today. I'm sure the audience is going to love what we're going to talk about today. And well, what are we going to talk about today? We're talking about Azure Stack HCI. So we want to talk about what Azure Stack HCI is, and why it is more than only an operating system. Okay. So Azure Stack HCI, it's a real buzzword. I think we've even created an acronym for it, which is ASHCI. So that's our own Azure Stack HCI, like with acronym to acronym, double acronym. But what is Azure Stack HCI, Sven? If you could, in a nutshell, explain that to people. What would you say that is for the audience? Yeah. I think it makes sense to start with the question, what is HCI? So HCI is a hyper-converged infrastructure. This is nothing completely new. It's only a new technology to provide a classical 3-tier cluster. So in the past, we had 3-teals like storage, network, and compute. And HCI brings together all those three components. And the network and the storage part will be replaced with software-related things like network and storage are managed by the software and not by the hardware. And this is the magic of HCI. And Azure Stack HCI is the operating system running the cyber-converged infrastructures. So it's a completely new operating system, like Windows Server is. And Azure Stack HCI is the operating system for the host, so for the hardware, to enable HCI. And then we have the guest operating systems, and those guest operating systems, you can run Linux or Windows Server, whatever you want to. So it's a completely new operating system. I think that's good for people to hear that, because again, there's probably a bit of confusion out there with some people that, you know, and we've had some, I wouldn't say false storms, but we've had different iterations of Windows Server doing certain different things. It's nice to understand that Azure Stack HCI is a completely new OS. Now, as Azure Stack does not include Windows Server VM rights, okay? Do you need to go and get, in addition to that, you know, Windows Server data center, you know, why would a customer invest in Azure Stack instead of using, say, S2D with a data center license, you know, in that scenario? What's the difference? Yeah, so Azure Stack HCI is based on the technology Storage Spaces Direct, and Storage Spaces Direct is included in Windows Server data center. It's not brand new. We had it in Windows Server 2019, for example, but in Azure Stack HCI, we have additional features. And in Windows Server data center, the good thing is that Storage Spaces Direct is included, it's for free without any additional cost. But Microsoft is not investing a lot in the S2D part in Windows Server data center. All the new features coming to HCI is limited for Azure Stack HCI. So for customers with limited needs for an HCI environment, Windows Server data center with Storage Spaces Direct might be good enough. And the good news is it's not end of support. So we will have it in Windows Server 2022. We will have it in Windows Server 2025, for example. So we are supporting this. But on the other side, Azure Stack HCI is an absolute focus product of Microsoft. So you can see we had ignite two or three weeks ago, and we announced all the new features in Azure Stack HCI, and there are a lot of them. And they are only available in Azure Stack HCI, not in Storage Spaces Direct. And this makes Azure Stack HCI special. Another thing, and that's why I said at the beginning that Azure Stack HCI is more than an operating system, because the difference between Storage Spaces Direct and Azure Stack HCI is the workload running on Azure Stack HCI. So at ignite, we announced, for example, that Azure Virtual Desktop is coming on premises. So into your data center, but only if you're running Azure Stack HCI. If you're running Windows Server cluster with data center Storage Spaces Direct, Azure Virtual Desktop is not available. If you're running any competitive solution, it's not available. So Azure Virtual Desktop is only available in Azure and Azure Stack HCI. And another one is Windows Server Azure Edition, for example, that's addition with additional features that are not included in the origin Windows Server, but it's included in the Azure version of Windows Server. And all those new features are coming to Azure Stack HCI also, and this makes Azure Stack HCI so powerful. Okay, so it's, I suppose, a modern solution for that hybrid infrastructure. So Sven, what are we talking about? What else should we have in mind to understand with these benefits? What other benefits are there of Azure Stack that really make it different? Yeah, for example, Stretch Cluster is a feature that's available in Azure Stack HCI, but not in S2D. And I am in contact with a lot of system integrators all across Germany these days. And they tell me that the Stretch Cluster feature is one of the features the people love most. And this is the reason why they are going with Azure Stack HCI. Because we have a lot of customers outside with a lot of branch offices, and they want to split their cluster across all those offices. And only Azure Stack HCI is able to do that. And there are a lot of Azure related workloads like Azure Kubernetes Services to manage and to deploy containers. And if you want to do this, you can do this on-premises with Windows Server 2022, for example. You can do this in Azure, and you can do this in Azure Stack HCI. But the benefit in doing this with Azure Stack HCI is that Azure Stack HCI OS is very similar to what we have in Azure. If you're running Windows Server on-premises and you're using Azure in the cloud, it's all Microsoft, but the OSs are very different. So it's not so easy to migrate solution or to combine it. It's possible, but it's not so easy. If you're using Azure Stack HCI, it feels like your on-premises infrastructure is part of Azure. Especially if you're using Azure Arc, for example. So Azure Arc is a very new solution. You can put Azure Arc on your on-premises Windows Server OSes, no matter if they are running on Hyper-V or VMware. Maybe they are in the multi-cloud. And Azure Arc brings all those Windows servers together. And you have one single glass of pain to manage and view all your Windows servers. And so Azure Stack HCI and Azure Stack HCI and Azure are becoming more or less one big solution. This is one of the benefits of Azure Stack HCI compared to competitive solutions. So it's actually more complicated because you can do more with it, but it's simpler because it's all in one place. And also, we're getting people out of that server room and they can now work from a nice desk in a nice place and they can actually manage that all in the cloud, which is really cool. Now, when I think about competitive HCI solutions, I see a lot with, say, one of my partners I talked to about Nutanix or VSAN or these other types of HCI solutions that are out there in the market. What is really the benefit of the Microsoft Azure Stack solution versus, say, Nutanix, VSAN? What would you say the killer differences are? I think the benefit is the strategy of Azure Stack HCI. So if you look at all the competitive solutions at the moment, Nutanix and VMware with VSAN absolutely have the majority of share worldwide. So Azure Stack HCI is very new and you might think, okay, I go with all those other solutions because there are a lot of partners who are familiar with the solution and they are able to deploy, they have a lot of experience. But if you invest into an Azure Stack HCI solution these days, it makes sense to look into the future where all those solutions are going to and where your infrastructure is going to. So if you only want to run an on-premises infrastructure and cloud is nothing, you have a mind for the next couple of years, then maybe S2D and Windows Server is good enough for you or maybe you go with an alternative solution because of cost or whatever. But if you really want to go hybrid, then you should decide what cloud solution is the one you prefer. And if it's Azure, then of course Azure Stack HCI is closest to Azure and it makes sense to use the on-premises OS that is linked to the public cloud. But another point is that Microsoft is investing a lot in cloud solutions. So cloud first is something Satya Nadella said and I think it was 2014 and this is what we live at Microsoft. So every investment is going into cloud solutions. But Azure Stack HCI, even if it is an on-premise solution, is part of our cloud strategy. So we have hundreds and thousands of engineers and people working on Azure Stack HCI because we think this is something that's supporting our cloud strategy. So you will see a lot of improvements in Azure Stack HCI, new features and so on over the next couple of years. And Windows Server has a refresh cycle of three years. For Azure Stack HCI, we will have a lot of new features minimum every year. And so it's not only about looking at the solution today. It's looking about where is the solution going to. And if you trust on Microsoft and trust on the engineers of Microsoft and look what Azure is going to. So if you look at the development of Azure over the last couple of years, so when we started our public cloud, we were the small one around all our competitors. And to look at Microsoft now, we are leading in so many ways. And Azure is one of the broadest and most performant solutions we have. And the same will happen with Azure Stack HCI. So I guess it's one eye on the future. It's about longevity. And also I suppose it's scale. Because when you look at the investments that Microsoft put into that space, we're able to develop so much faster. So it's that eye on the future. So maybe you're thinking short term, save some money, I'll get the Nutanix solution right now. But that might not work for you in five years time. So actually you need to make sure that you're investing with an eye on the future so that your infrastructure and scalability and all of that kind of stuff is actually in the right place to take your business forward. So yeah, okay, that makes sense to me. So who is the target group? Who is going to be like today, take advantage of Azure Stack HCI? And what are the use cases for people out there? Yeah, the target group is every customer who's running a traditional three tier cluster. I read a study. It's round about three years ago. And that study, it was from VMware, I guess, says that 80% of existing clusters will be refreshed by an HCI cluster over the next couple of years. So following the study, I can say that a customer with a cluster is a potential for HCI. And the potential for HCI is a potential for Azure Stack HCI. And there are some workloads that are very relevant. So for example, in Windows Server 2019, Microsoft announced that Office or Microsoft 365 apps are not supported any longer on Windows Server. One year after the launch, we had a solution that fixed the problem. And now we were able to do that. With Windows Server 2022, we said there's no way to support Office 365 apps on Windows Server any longer. The reason for that is that Office 365 is a product that gets a lot of new features and updates every month, every quarter and so on. So it's an as a service product. But Windows Server is something you buy and there are no changes in the product. And it's very difficult to bring those two product types together. So as a service and perpetual license. And that's why so many customers today are thinking about what should I do with my RDS environment? So my remote desktop services environment in the future. So in the past, I had Office on my Windows Server. Now it's not any longer supported. And Azure Virtual Desktop, including the Office solutions, is something that's possible on Azure Stack HCI. So it's possible in your on-premises. And talking to partners and customers, I learned that from the announcement three weeks ago, I denied until today, this is one of the most relevant topics our partners and customers are talking about. And that Azure Stack HCI is supporting Azure Virtual Desktop. And this is only one of the solutions we usually have exclusive in Azure coming to Azure Stack HCI, coming to your on-premises. So I can't say a specific size of a customer or a specific vertical is our target group. What I can say is that a customer who needs an HCI environment because they want to refresh their traditional 3-tier cluster, and they are looking for features that are only available in Azure these days or in Windows Server Azure Edition is our target group. Okay, perfect. Okay, so from what I've just gathered from you, it made sense for any and everybody who's thinking of investing in server infrastructure right now to be thinking about Azure Stack HCI. Do you see any particular maybe bottlenecks for people? Is there anything that's going to hold up that transition to the new world of Azure Stack for people? Yes, absolutely. So I talked to an MVP in Microsoft, most valuable professional in Germany, and I asked him about his idea about Azure Stack HCI in the next calendar year. So how many customers do you have? How many solutions are you going to sell? And he said it's very easy to sell this because his traditional customers are coming to him and say, I'm very interested in Azure Stack HCI. So he said about 200 solutions he is able, only he is able to sell the next calendar year. The issue I see is that we don't have enough people like him because he is able to deploy, to plan, to manage Azure Stack HCI. But there are not a lot of people who are able to do that. And this is our bottleneck. So from my gut feel, we have around about five to 10 people in whole Germany that are really able today to deploy and manage an Azure Stack HCI environment. And this is not enough. So what we are going to do is to find out who are the correct, who are the most relevant partners with the most relevant customers. And then we try to find out who are the employees with the basic technical skills to be able to do Azure Stack HCI tomorrow. And then we are going to invest a lot in making those people ready. So everyone who has technical resources and is willing to invest in readiness for those resources to be ready to deploy and manage Azure Stack HCI should come to Microsoft and say, okay, we want to sell the solution. We are very interested in customers that we don't have the readiness. Yeah. And also they could do the new trading modules that are coming next year. That would be a good start. What module? So we've got new trading modules coming next year, haven't we, on proper fundamentals on hybrid and Azure Stack HCI? Yeah. I have seen those two modules, but those modules are focusing on the Azure services part. So it's more about how to manage, how to use the Microsoft management tools. It's not about hardware. There's nothing about hardware. But this is very important because you have to replace your existing hardware with a new one. You have to replace your Windows Server environment with Azure Stack HCI. It's not very likely that we have customers building their Azure Stack HCI environment on a green field. Most of them have an existing infrastructure and you need a very deep knowledge about how to put the new Azure Stack HCI into the existing data center from the hardware and from the software and from the networking and storage perspective. So it's a broad band of knowledge you need. And those new training courses are focusing on the management of Azure Stack HCI, not really on the deployment, unfortunately. Okay. Okay. Well, it's a starting point, anyway. Maybe we can ask then for a deployment module. I think that's probably, that's the takeaway that I'm going to take away from this. Yeah, what we are doing in Germany, for example, we have an MVP that is spending a lot of time in doing readiness for partners. And he created readiness paths for pre-sales, for deployment, for administrators. So it's a two to five days course where you're having a theoretical and practical readiness to be able to do the things you have to do. And at the end, you will have an additional day for trying to find out if you're really ready. So you're doing a kind of test on an existing environment. And you have to show that you have learned all the things you need. And then you can get some kind of certificate. It will not be a certificate from Microsoft, because it's an individual trainer offering this. But if anyone is interested in having this deep dive training and readiness, he is offering it in German and in English. So you could contact me or... I'm interested. If my boss is listening, as soon as we can get past COVID, I'm more than happy to come to Germany for a three-day session. Anyway, Sven, look. You can do it online. You can do it online. But you're welcome in Germany. No, no, no. I have to come. Yeah, no, I have to come. It's not available online. It's not available online. To me, online. Not for you. But Sven, thank you very much. I told the audience we were in for a treat. You really do know your stuff when it comes to Azure Stack. So any questions for Sven, anything that I've not asked him that you want to ask him, we will make sure that he gets those questions. Please send them in to me and the team. And we'd love to get those questions. Now, Sven, every single time we do an episode, we have this thing called the meme server meme review. The server meme review is basically silly memes that are out there that I'm sure are hilarious and humorous, generally speaking, I don't know what they mean. So I'm kind of getting there with them. Now, for the audience, if you have any memes that you want to send in, please do let me know what they are. Now, Sven, what we do is we show the memes, you probably will understand the meme, and I probably won't understand the meme, and then that's the beauty of the meme review. So let's see the first, let's get a reaction to the first meme. I don't always crash, but when I do, you can be sure it's at 2am. Yeah, that's a wonderful one. But the good thing is, this is a very big data center, I guess. But the good thing is that in a modern data center like Azure, there is a lot of software defined. So you don't need human beings to keep this kind of data center up and running. So no matter if there's an issue at 2am or at 2pm, the customer will get the performance they want to have, no matter if there's a problem in a specific data center. But yeah, absolutely. Usually it's 2am on Sunday or Saturday. Yeah. I often crash at 2am, but nothing to do with a server. Anyway, so that's just me. Right, let's do meme number two. Oh, test server used as an expensive space heater. Yeah, it's true. I think sometimes people do use servers as heaters. Yeah, we are laughing when we see this picture, but if I look into all the data we have at Microsoft about old infrastructure like unsupported OS like Windows 7 or Windows XP or Windows Server 2008, I wonder why so many customers are still using this unsupported OS. And talking to the OEMs, we know that there's a lot of old hardware outside. And so it's very funny to see this, but I think in a lot of small companies, this is reality these days. Yeah. And if they want to save money on heating, they can use that old server and it heats up their office nice. So it's like lose wind because your data is probably susceptible to being hacked. And if you've got customers, their customer data is probably going to get stolen. Fine, but you're warm. So that's okay. But yeah, it's not a good move. It's not a good move. Okay, so let's summarize really quickly. I think what you were saying was that from a stretch cluster in perspective, if that's what you want to go do and you want to basically optimize your estate, then Azure Stack is the thing for you. It's incredibly new, but it's a new full flavored OS from Microsoft. It's not built on that old Windows Server tech. It's never evolving, yearly updating, new exciting OS, which is really going to basically modernize people's HCI and gives people the comfort that there's a one eye on the future with Microsoft putting all the engineering effort into this with the cloud, with Azure. And that is essentially what Azure Stack is in a nutshell. Would you suggest that I've missed anything off on my explanation, Sven? No, that's perfect. You know what? When Sven says it's perfect, then it is perfect. So everybody massive round of applause for Sven. Thank you for coming. Thank you all for listening. If you want to know any more about server tech, about Azure Stack HCI, about, you know, recent option kits because we still like it when you buy those. Anything you want to buy or anything you want to know about server, let me know on Rock to the Cloud, even if you've got silly memes, and we will try and get them onto the show. Thanks very much for today's episode, and we'll see you all soon. Cheers, everybody. Bye. Bye-bye.