 Oh, hi everybody. Welcome to the latest episode from the rock the cloud. As you know, I'm your host Tom Hall and in these series of videos we do everything from rock servers and traditional Windows server and we talk about all the exciting goodness in the cloud up with things like Azure. So yeah, all of that good stuff and we try and make it as interesting and kind of as obvious as it needs to be which is kind of the secret to I think why we're talking to you. Now each episode you don't want to talk to me. You want to talk to a special guest you want to talk to somebody who knows what they're doing and this week we've managed to get somebody pretty good. I'm going to talk about him in a second. Now, if you have any questions, if you have any comments, if you want to see something on a future episode, let me know because if I don't know what to do, then we don't know what to do. And then you end up with just my random thoughts. So that's pretty scary. It's a dark place. So today we've actually managed to get well you might have seen him from such previous episodes as launching Windows server 2022 only two weeks ago. We've got Mr. Rick Claus. So Rick, how are you doing nice to see I don't feel like we need to do you an introduction. You might have seen me other things such as build such as Microsoft Ignite tech ads have been around a while. I'm Rick Claus. I lead a team of people around the world that basically do the stuff that I used to do by myself or with another type of small team. And yeah, we did this little thing for helping launch Windows server 2022 is not too long ago. It's just a whole brand new service. I've got to get this out of it. I've got to get this off my chest, right? Okay, what's the story with the hat? Let's fight. Let's just get this out of the way because everyone's going to like what is going on? Rick Rick's always got the hat on. What's the story with that? Well, you know, the first thing is I'm bald. So I like to have a hat on keep my head warm. But I've had a hat like this for probably close to 30 20 30 40 years. I forget how long it's been. It's been a very, very long time. But when I was a consultant before joining Microsoft, I used to obviously wear the hat to events and to engagements and the customers. And then when I started public speaking, I would also have the hat, but I would have it off. I would have it off to the side. And then finally, people started to say, how come, you know, it's wearing the hat like just relax. And so I started to wear the hat. And then I started doing stuff for Microsoft and started doing videos and training and all sorts of stuff like that. So the hat's basically always on. It's my secret weapon. It gives me extra superpowers. So the hat came synonymous with Rick and Rick became the hat and the two became one. Much like that spy scale song. So you like the hat is Rick Rick is the hat. And there's actually a Twitter account called Rick's Tilly hat that I don't write someone else does. And it tweets occasionally. It's a little snarky. But it's got a little bit of Canadian for snickering us, I guess you would say. Well, for snickering, I think it's specific. I think that's Canadian word. So if it isn't, it should be. It sounds the sort of thing that any Canadian would say. So I think, yeah. But it's kind of like, you know, when like a celebrity person has that person that runs their Twitter feed, that's kind of basically what you've got for your hat. And so occasionally I will tweet pictures of the hat to the hat account just so the hat can use them. But yeah, it's it's actually my secret weapon with it is basically if you want to find me, just look for the hat in the crowd of thousands of people at an event. You want to ask questions. Great for having an easy way for people to find me. The inverse of that is true as well. If I need to make a beeline for the hotel room or for the bar to get my first pint, I take the hat off and I'm just some random 40 year old fat balding guy at Microsoft. So it's perfect for camouflage. Just turning 40 myself. I know exactly how that feels. So today, Rick, we're going to talk because obviously Windows Server 22 WS2022 has just launched. But one of the things that kind of struck me when I watched all the footage and kind of reading about kind of what's happening. It's kind of like the first proper hybrid cloud OS that we've kind of done that's properly just like, like, you know, out there saying that it is it is that not just it can be used in that way. If you do a couple of these things like, you know, what we actually were saying was there's now a whole solution. And the other thing that I've really found interesting was actually Azure Stack HCI. And then within that, there's that sort of divergence between Windows Server HCI and then Azure Stack HCI. And they're kind of like it's confusing, right? So we're talking hybrids and there's lots of different versions of things. And within that there's Azure Stack HCI and other HCI's and all this kind of stuff. So that's what we're going to talk about today, I think, isn't it? I think that's the way to go for sure. You're kind of poking at all the edges of stuff as the operating system has evolved and has evolved. So there's only certain things that I can share about that whole evolution and how it was all planned. It's all there. But the Windows Server 22, I definitely agree. It's the latest incarnation of Windows Server that does have a lot of tie-ins. But not requirements to go off and be enabled even stronger and better and cooler when you tie it into an Azure environment. But it completely works without it and can work and do different things. And then as you alluded to, Azure Stack HCI is this other kind of thing that I hope to be able to demystify for you as well. But the best thing is Windows Server 2022 and even Azure Stack HCI, it fits in your current environment. So if you're running 2008 R2, it shouldn't be, but you probably are somewhere over here and over there. It can fit in there. It's your next natural migration path towards it. If you're running 2012, 2016, 2019, it just kind of all happens to fit in there nicely and gives you this more modern connection point to it. And are you allowed to drink during this show? We thoroughly recommend being British. We thoroughly recommend drinking at all times. This is coffee, it's not tea, and it's also not beer, but it's in a beer mug, just to clarify. That's a beer mug. So I did think it was, well, it's kind of over in Europe. It kind of got like October first going on kind of now. And that's kind of almost like a German looking beer mug. Nice Stein. Yes, exactly. So I think that thing that I poked at, that adaptability piece of hybrid, let's start by talking about what do you think the biggest changes are with Server 2022 and hybrid? Like how are we making it more hybrid? I think that's probably a place where we should start. Okay. So from its simplest terms, as I mentioned, Windows Server 2022 fits inside of your environment right now. No matter what version you have, it's a great destination to upgrade and get into that latest version. You procure it the same way you would purchase it any other way from an OEM reseller, from a large account reseller, whatever it happens to be. You just simply go off and you license it. It does require CALS to be able to go off and touch and use those services like any other Windows Server product that happens to be there. But as I mentioned, it's got functionality that's obviously designed for on-premises and give you advantages just if you're on-premises. But when you tie it into the cloud through the management tools is the main way that it does it. It gets this extra functionality and extra ease of use to bring in solutions that fix it. And that's where Windows Admin Center comes in. But we'll save that for another episode because we're focusing this one on the operating system and on Azure Stack HCI. But the first thing people always ask me is, what are some of the things that are new inside of Server 2022? Sorry, Windows Server. Well, I was just going to ask you that. Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, the thing you need to get used to is, for gosh darn sake, trying not to use profanity right now. Windows Server Core. I mean, I do have one of these buttons that just let me do it. But I don't know if it's going to work out. Wait a minute, I want to have a go at that. I want to have a go at that, sorry. Three, two, one. I don't. I don't like. Oh, I'm going to get one of those buttons. I'm going to get one of those buttons. It's the best thing. They become standard issue if you're mic on a job. So it comes in quite handy. When people use like competitor names, like, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, like, you know, VMware. I love it. We'll leave it that. I probably freaked out the audio guy a bit much when we wouldn't go off and use it. But so the main thing I want to call out is simply, there are functions, as I mentioned, there's functionality for when you're on-premises stuff. And you connect that up to Azure with Windows and MinCenter. But even some things like some enhancements that we did, we focused on security as one thing to obviously bring into the environment. And so we've now tied in and brought in some technology like we called, that's part of the industry at the chip level, at the firmware level on the boxes for a secure core. So you now have access to secure core functionality down the chip level beyond the firmware to protect you from ransomware built in a server 2022, which is absolutely good. Some other goodness that's there from a new functionality perspective that will help you inside your environments. Again, not necessarily this hybrid piece is SMB compression being able to be turned on. So with modern clients, Windows 10, Windows 11, you can turn on at the server side, literally a checkbox that makes it so that the server does compression when it transfers large files between those two systems. And it's completely transparent in the background to save you some good bandwidth to it. This is so weird for me, because I'm like a fanboy right now, because I watched the law a few weeks ago, and you said on checkbox. And you're saying it again on a podcast that we're talking, this is brilliant. So I'm just honestly, I'm not going to say I'm just like you talk. Yeah, so the other part is kind of interesting is there's some new functionality that's come into play with the new variation on the operating system, which is called the Azure edition of Windows Server 2022. And I want to clarify this and also simplify this. The Azure edition is a special version that runs inside of Azure to give you extra functionality that you can do, excuse me, and leverage inside of Azure. But you can also run it on premises if you're running an Azure stack HCI box. That's one of the reasons why we're going to talk about HCI coming up here in just a bit a little bit later on. But that's where some of the really interesting cloud connected hybrid capabilities come in. And the coolest one that I think is really neat is this thing that's called auto manage and hot patching auto manage and hot patching is basically a service that Microsoft has up inside of the Azure space. That'll go through and think of it like the oil like I would call us oil check oil, oil, oil, lube and filter on your car. You're on your glory. Right. It's, it's, it's keeping the servers online keeping them happy updated patch monitoring logs and stuff like that. But you can subscribe to the service that's inside of Azure that does that for you inside Azure, obviously, but then also in your on premises world. If you have Windows Server 2022 installed and working on an Azure stack HCI, you can basically turn on the, what am I calling it, the auto manage functionality as well as the code being there as well. I'll stick with the proper terms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's fair enough. Well, so there's tons of cool new things that are actually mean that it's optimized for that hybrid world. That's cool. Right. And obviously, and we're not going to go into it heavily, but for me, like Azure Arc is that little bit of magic as well that means that we can now have on prem. Because I think that's really important for our audience is understanding how the on-prem bit works in the same environment as the Azure cloud piece. And that's the little, that's a little kind of, I want to call it a widget, but it's not a widget, but it's a little bit. It just seems to me like it should be a widget, but it's that little bit of magic that's allowing those policies to work and then kind of all join up and then you can manage it. Right. So we've got Azure Arc. And I've done a great job of explaining that from previous episodes. Thanks. Thanks, Thomas Moira for explaining that probably a lot better than what I, but we're going to, we're not going to talk about that. We're just acknowledging it. But then we're going to move to Azure Stack HCI. And I think for me, I think, because there's kind of like two flavors. Maybe you could tell us a difference in two flavors, like the kind of what's happened. It's kind of like an important moment in time right now, isn't it? Yeah. So the main thing to understand is that Azure Stack HCI is, is a, an operating system that is designed to be in a clustered environment that has at least a couple of nodes on it for redundancy purposes, but then it provides you services like a hyper converged infrastructure. That's what HCI stands for. So you need to have, as they say, you want, you want to, you want to PES dispenser for VMs to be able to just spin up VMs as you need them. That's what Azure Stack HCI can do very, very easily using hyper V as an example for the, for the hypervisor. You need to have some fast high end storage that you want to attach up to your VMware environment and your VSAN or your HCI cluster or a SQL server box and like that. Azure Stack HCI has that super fast storage that you can now expose to the other world. That's why it's HCI. It can also do hyper converged networking to be able to do software defined networking inside of that virtualization world as well. So Azure Stack HCI is simply a different configuration of the operating system. Now where, where you mentioned the inflection point is version one of the stuff is one that is standalone currently available now and is potentially going to be aging out and going away. You bought it when you bought your hardware configuration. So if you get a partner like Dell HP or some of the other partners that are specializing in the space like data on data on as a group of folks that are out of the West Coast of America, but they sell around the world. They got some really cool purpose built systems designed to run this for you to make it super easy to plug in and to work. You get your HCI box, two pieces of tin that you want to go and rack inside your server rack and you plug in. Once you join them to the domain, you simply create the Azure Stack HCI through a wizard interface. And that gives you that control plane to now create VMs, create fast storage, create networking or potentially use some of this new hybrid stuff in the version two is basically what I just explained that allows you to spin up a VM that becomes auto managed or that becomes connected to what they know as another new thing from the launch, which was the quick protocol. That could literally be a file server that lives inside of Azure if you wanted to you expose a specific port that is a non standard port and you and you have a communication from your end users using TLS encryption, TLS transport and encryption to get up and talk to that system. The user has no clue, they think the server is literally down the hall from them or under someone's desk, but in actual fact someplace else. And there's no connect the VPN. There's no, there's no have to authenticate with it like it all happens in the background and it just works. And that's why quick is actually kind of cool. So I've probably lost everybody with my flow because it's kind of early you don't have my contract down I'm trying to just keep this real so Azure Stack HCI is basically an interface and a product solution that now is giving you the ability to easily give you hyperconverged infrastructure of virtualization storage and networking on premises that ties into all of your existing stuff, but then is lit up by talking to Azure and that's the last part that I want to say is the current version requires you that you register it with Azure within 30 days. So it knows how to provide you with these added benefits, but then also it does incur a cost to be able to be connected to Azure to be able to bring down this goodness. And so that's how it's licensed if you will it's by the hardware plug it into your Azure account once it's created, and then you have access to all this Azure goodness and we take care of the management of giving the operating system and things like that on the nodes themselves. Yeah, and I suppose then that's where you would have a guest OS in that virtual environment and that's, and then you could decide to buy that flavor whichever way you want and put that in the cloud and use that or maybe even reuse some licenses that you maybe aren't using anymore. Like you've got that flexibility to actually really figure out the smartest way to save you money around the technology. So yeah, like it's that I think that's why it's exciting because it gives people that opportunity to get exactly what they want and pay what they need to at a budget they can afford. And so, so yeah, absolutely. Now if we take those stats scenario what let's turn it into scenario where would be the best place for me to use Azure stack like you know what I mean like what's an ideal couple of scenarios because again, talking out from a technology point of here it does this this and this groovy. Yeah, but who's it best for so I want to I want to clarify something because because words matter. You just said the word Azure stack. It's Azure stack HCI that we're talking about this is specific version. It's not Azure stack hub, which is completely different. And a whole different way that it works and how you manage it. This is Azure stack HCI. As I mentioned, you buy it through an OEM reseller you buy it from your hardware provider. They give you two or four or six nodes of a configuration. They literally are just Windows server that is the Azure stack HCI version. You join them to the domain and then you can finish the configuration what it looks like. The scenario is two things there. First of all, that's like being told off by teachers. So thank you. Number two, that's actually Microsoft's fault for having so many down versions of the same thing. The same name like that. I'm just saying we're really good at having a lot of options and you get to choose those names right like what fits you. And so like you said, I'm running right now an Azure stack HCI box that I got from data on as a loaner device to do some demos on things. And it's literally two 1U servers that are racked inside of a lab that are completely, I'm going to say inexpensive cost effective. You know, it's like a couple of maybe 10, 15 grand with hardware or something like that. It depends on what you buy and what you spec it out as, but they're just 228 gig two core or sorry, two proc machines, 14 cores a piece. And it's running with four SSD slash NVMe drives for super fast storage. So this is a screaming virtualization platform at an entry level because of the RAM to be able to go off and be like a VMware sort of VMS PES dispenser just to simply spit out VMs as you need to, right? So that's very handy inside of retail situation. You want to have small footprint, you want to be able to go off and have your base infrastructure for your five retail stores and have a very easy lightweight platform in the back end for doing something. This could be a branch office configuration as well could even be like a main office for being able to do things to they also sell versions of this that are rugged eyes that could be off the back of a truck. If you wanted to for hashtag HCI for Harbor platform, we could also run it in a way that it actually is extremely portable like two desktop systems with a USB cable between them as a way of being able to function as a as a cluster to be able to provide virtualization platform that runs these VMs in a highly available way in case one system happens to fall down. This isn't new technology. This is stuff that's been around for a while. And it's simply packaged together in a way that makes it super dead simple to use in the manage. I mean, I can show you the interface if you want and take a look at it if you want to. Great. I would love to see the interface. Okay, so, so what I'm going to show you like this. This literally is your Windows server core view of what servers look like these days right you should not be installing the desktop interface on your systems anymore. And so this is my server console for my control plane of Windows server, sorry, Windows server 2022 running and talking and managing an Azure stack HCI environment. And so this is my particular box is called our claws dash whack for Windows admin center. I'm actually going to exit out to the command line for it because Windows admin center which ties into all of this is managed through a browser. And so this is Windows admin center talking to a couple of different nodes of Azure stack. And so you can see here. There's node one of modern fraud dash and one. And there's also no to have that particular box. And then there is the actual Azure stack HCI cluster that's installed on top of those things. So if I just look at this from a management perspective this is Windows server 2022 as an example. If I connect into a particular box web interface super lightweight super easy to be able to go off and to see what this looks like. And it gives me good tombstone information of performance how much Rams being used the configuration how much hard drive space, all the basic nuts and bolts you need to have be able to have your system up and running. And you can even have nice little graphs and pictures in case you want to show those off to your friends, what they look like. They're up and running to say this particular box is working, but the magic of the hybrid piece that we've been talking about all this time for server Windows server 2022 is all over here on the left hand side. It's all the stuff that is talking about being able to configure easily one click. Let's configure a backup in the cloud with Azure backup. Let's go in and make a bottomless file server with Azure file sync as an example. This all ties in from a user interface to really simply set this up without you having to dive into the Azure portal and go through all these massive screens to be able to configure it. We just like literally have like an easy button, if you will, people to go off and configure it as you've associated this particular box with that particular install for Windows and Min Center talking to a Windows server 2022 box. In this case, it's an Azure Stack HCI version of that box. So the only difference between looking at this or Azure Stack HCI is changing to the cluster view of the clusters that have been registered. And then there are two clusters in my demo environment here. One of them is called Docs Media and one of them is here, the hybrid system. And the hybrid system again connects up to it and needs to wake up like the rest of us here first thing in the morning. So spend things up. This interface will give me access to the cluster view of both of those nodes together providing a service, compute, storage and networking. And you can see here that I've got a couple of different views that I can take a look at how much memory is being used out of the total amount. Do I have any CPU utilization? Is there is there delays talking to the different cluster nodes back and forth? Am I running out of space? As you can see, it's not a very terribly exciting view on the virtual machines because they aren't doing very much right now. They're just kind of sitting there right now. It's a lightweight web interface to be able to go in and to manage and have access to Azure Stack HCI and also Windows Server 2022 inside of your environments. It's the simplicity of it. I think Rick, they're actually irrespective of obviously these servers I'm doing a lot right now. But actually, if they were getting more complicated, it would still be in that simple view. I think that's still inside the simple view. And the neat thing is this is a dedicated box for the architecture that I have set up. I've got one box which is running Windows Server 2019 actually. And it has the install that I downloaded of Windows Admin Center. And that particular install puts up a ultra lightweight web hosting environment. It's not using IAS. It's actually using something different that's more lightweight than IAS is. It doesn't want to interfere with what you have going on with IAS if it's there. And then it has a extensible model of plugins that give you the functionality. And I showed you an example, the plugin to talk to Azure Backup, the plugin to talk to Azure Files, but also third party plugins. This is a data on cluster I'm talking to. So the data on folks have their own plugin that they've created for the low level management of the hardware inside of Windows Admin Center that happens to be there. So the interface runs on a browser and then any browser can go off and talk to this. Now, we could literally do a whole other show talking about Windows Admin Center and System Center and how that all works. I'm trying to stay away from that until another episode. I'm sure we will at some point. It's the control plane. It's the control plane that allows you to manage your Windows Server environments because you can bring in, by simply saying over here in Server Manager, go to the view of the servers, you can go in and say add and then put in the name of a server, search your Active Directory for your three or four servers, your 12 servers, your 150 servers you want to go off and manage. And it uses your existing security context that you're what you have access to with inside your environment and then brings them in to be make them manageable. Like I just made them clickable by clicking on the left hand side to go off and manage them. Nothing extra to install. Nothing other configuration required on those boxes. They can be Server 2012, 2016, 2019 or 2022 or Azure Stack HCI to bring them in and manage the environment with Windows Admin Center. Okay. Well, thanks for showing us that first of all. We always love a live demo. We did have one go wrong. Anyway, don't talk to us. No, no, no, we survived that one. So, and just, I know I kind of roughly summarized licenses, but let's talk about licenses a bit more because I just want to make sure that people understand when they're buying this technology and they're buying, say, the tin or whatever. How does that licensing bit work for 30 days and all that kind of stuff? Let's just be super clear on how that works. Yeah, so for Windows Server 2022, obviously it's your standard licensing process. When you buy a piece of hardware, you normally buy the license with it. If you have existing licenses that you've got software assurance on, whatever it is, all that same sort of stuff applies to be able to go off and to use those licenses. You do require CALS for Windows Server 2022 to have access to those different services that are on that box. For Azure Stack HCI, you're basically buying the hardware from the hardware provider. They provide you with the OS, but it's basically only available to be used in a disconnected form for up to 30 days. And then it basically says, we need to be registered at this point in time. So, attach me up to an Azure subscription. So, you attach it up to an Azure subscription and then you basically pay for the number of cores that are running on that box. That is a flat fee. And that basically covers the licensing, the access to all systems, access to all services that are on that box. There's no CAL require at that point in time. It's just a monthly charge for those individual licensed nodes that it handles connection into that. Again, I've got a video that kind of shows how to hook that up if you really wanted to see it. It's literally just a matter of go to the web interface, click on register, and then that's kind of it. I'm going to say, show it to people just because you've got it. It would be selfish of me not to let people see it. Okay, so here's a demo video because it does take time for this to happen. So, I've sped this up. I don't know if we can bring this up here. Rick calls control time. Look, I'm doing it with my hands free. So it's a web interface. You have to authenticate to Azure. I'm speeding this up because it takes some time. So there's my multi-factor authentication to make sure I know who I am. Choose the subscription you want to attach up to because it's tied to a subscription. You could have multiple ones. I've chosen the proper one because I did my research. Once that's been connected with Windows Admin Center, it basically creates an application inside of Azure that this particular box is known for. From this point forward, because it has to interface with Azure on your behalf. Those error messages are normal because I haven't granted it the extra level of access it requires to act on my behalf. And so the link takes me to the point where I literally have a checkbox to say, yes, if you have the rights to do so inside your Azure subscription. Now, Microsoft, they don't give me the rights. And so this is attached to my MSDN subscription. So I just basically granted the proper access. You have only $146 in there. I'm a bit concerned about you. I know. I'm going to run out pretty soon. So I got to watch out for that, right? So I'm just going to pause the video here to show you this. You can see the granular rights that are required for Azure Stack HCI. There's nothing hidden here. If you need to and you don't have access to the Azure subscription, you can take these requirements and show them to your security team. And they can grant you the proper access and then you're able to go and function. This point forward, this Windows Admin Center has the same rights that I would have as I'm authenticating to it inside that box. So good to be able to see that experience of hooking that up. That basically registers it. So now all of my options on the left-hand side that I showed you, Azure File Sync, Azure Backup, that sort of stuff, that's now all going to be enabled. Now, the registration part is simply connecting it up to identify the proper service to go to. But you now have, as I mentioned, this hybrid center that you can now see. And this is where you talked a little bit about the Azure Arc piece as an option to have this kind of connection and understanding this hybrid capability. Azure Arc, we'll talk about that just briefly here when I do this setup. It literally is a matter of installing an agent. It's a framework, actually. Thomas will do a better job explaining this. But I like to conceptually say it brings down a component that uniquely identifies the virtual or physical box that you want to bring into Azure to get the Azure functionality of logging, monitoring, policy. The widget. It's kind of, I'll let you use that term. I don't want to actually say that. It's a widget. It's possibly as simple as a widget, yes. But it gives you it gives you visibility inside of Azure to be able to do it. So I am, I'm turning one of my nodes installing Azure Arc on it. And you can see here, I simply give it a resource group to where they get the visualization of that server appears and then where it happens to live inside of my data center because I care about data residency as an example. That literally is all it takes to set up an Azure Arc environment. I have to install Azure Arc on both of my nodes of Azure Stack HCI to have full functionality of management and monitoring in a health environment for my Azure Stack HCI boxes. And the last part of this, I believe here, if I go up to the cluster side of things with cluster manager, this is the part is registering the Windows admin center with Azure Stack HCI inside of your environment. And this is the, here's the button over here in the right hand corner under Azure connections is not yet registered as I have connectivity. I literally click on register this cluster. I choose where it's going to visually be inside of my subscription. I click on the registration button. And then the magic of video I've sped this up because it took about 15 minutes to actually take effect. It'll come back with a, you're now registered. And now I'm licensed correctly and it's monitoring collect correctly inside that environment. So this takes a little bit of time comes back here with the fact that you're now registered. And you're good to go for the added functionality that comes down from this point forward, the operating systems of the two different nodes are now managed by Microsoft. And that's part of what the fee is for. And you're now able to go off into leverage all the goodness that is the hybrid capabilities of Azure Stack HCI, just like there's hybrid capabilities of Windows Server 2022. So here inside the dashboard, you can now see this is what it looks like for my Azure Stack environment. I've got my Azure Stack HCI grouping. I now have my two boxes that have been added and are now being monitored by Azure to make sure that they're in a healthy state. And that is as thrilling of a demo as I can give for how to register and license your Azure Stack HCI box. Well, it's pretty straightforward. And what sort of dawns on me is actually because we're going to do a separate episode on Azure Arc with Thomas, as you've mentioned. But actually, all these little bits and components are actually part of the same thing. So, you know, it's not like Azure Arc isn't a separate thing. It's part of the story that makes HCI actually work properly. And actually, as like I've gone on this personal journey with talking to experts like yourself and actually talking to you guys has actually made this a lot easier for me to understand. So A, thank you for that. And B, like it's fascinating to see actually how it all kind of interconnects and works together. We're literally at the point in time where everything is kind of coming together. And it's a matter of one last step that you have to connect them just to make sure that you associate the proper pieces. So to kind of step back, Windows Server 2022 doesn't need to be registered to Azure. But if you have Windows Admin Center and you bring it in to Windows Admin Center to manage it because it has a much more modern interface for managing servers using Windows Admin Center over top of the native tools like MMC. That gives you added functionality. Bringing in Azure Arc onto those boxes gives you visibility inside of Azure and gives you the ability to go in and to now monitor changes, look at event logs, security things, apply policy down to those boxes. That's that extra bit of glue that brings extra functionality to Windows Server 2022. The last piece is if you need to have resources that you can use inside your environment and you want to be able to manage them effectively as a highly converged infrastructure. That's where Azure Stack HCI comes into play, which then again tie back up into Azure for added functionality. But gives you the ability to carve up virtualization chunks that make up machines, gives the ability to go in and to provide storage that's highly available and also highly super fast for your resources. That's what Azure Stack HCI gives you. And it's all managed with this one umbrella of this modern tool called Windows Admin Center, which then further makes it easy to go and leverage some of these cloud hybrid solutions to make your job easier and solve your pain points on premises. That's about as succinctly as I can bring it together. No, it's perfect. It was like a recipe for a cake. Do you know what I mean? I thought it was perfect. We've delved into it a bit and unfortunately we're going to have to let you go soon, but before we let you go, we've got fun bits to do first, so we've got to get the fun bits in. And I don't like to do too much techy talk all in one session, right? Okay. So I'm just trying to keep an eye on time. But first of all, before we get to that, is there anything else that's critical that you think Azure Stack HCI that people should know before we kind of move on to the fun stuff? Well, first of all, you can go and install this and try this out and kick the tires and see what it looks like if you want to. A good friend of mine, probably know him as Wall from the online world and doing videos with Microsoft. Matt McSpirit has done some great stuff to create what they call an evaluation guide that walks you through how to do an install of Azure Stack HCI and how you can start to leverage it and use it entirely in a virtual world. So if you have a machine that you can do virtualization on that has, you know, 100 and 100 and some odd giga RAM. If you need to have that much to be able to try it out, you can get away with 64, maybe even 32 just to evaluate it. He's got a setup guide that allows you to try this out to see what it looks like. I suggest you talk to your OEM partners and hardware vendors to understand if they have specific Azure Stack HCI versions of their hardware components. Again, a big shout out to DataON as an example of an innovative company that's doing some really cool stuff with really cool form factors. The big boys and girls have them as well with HP and Dell and Lenovo and stuff like that too. And it's literally an appliance that allows you to attach up into Azure that then allows you to go off and to start to provide virtualization, storage and networking in a managed way that then ties into the Azure goodness with those subscriptions to be able to go off and have extra functionality. Go off and try those out. I do have one more thing, but I think you might be asking me a question about it. So I'm going to wait until you ask me the question. Well, I was going to ask you because I remember seeing Bernardo Caldas. He kicked off the server launch a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned some accreditation. Now, for me, this is big news, right? Because we haven't had accreditation for a little while. So I think it's like AZ800801. Could you tell us a bit about those and why that's important for everybody? So, yes, for the first time in seven and a half years, there is a new role-based certification. It's no longer a product-based certification like the old ways of doing things. It's one of the reasons why it's taken us so long. Second reason is also it's just the conversion of these technologies that make it so that it's the right time to have a role-based, hey, I manage Windows servers. I manage them on premises and I manage them inside of Azure. And so the server exam that you're talking about is the Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate Certification. If that makes sense, it just rolls off the tongue. We let marketing come up with a name. I don't know why, but that's how it kind of came off as far as the name of the certifications concerned. It's now available from a beta perspective to get ready to try it out. He announced that it's now available. It is available for details at aka.ms slash WS Hybrid Admin Exam Guide. It just rolls off the tongue. I've got the web page up that shows you if you wanted to see it, but it looks like this particular breakdown of what the exam is like. And access to study guides and access to resources talking about this particular exam. Go out, do your research about the exam in your back. See, I've been talking for five minutes. I have no idea if you got any of that. And now I'm not getting audio from you. So I don't know if that's on my side or your side, but this is the joy of being remote and figuring this kind of stuff out. I got all of what you said, by the way, so we can just add it out. Awesome. I'm still not getting audio from Tom, though. I think he's still figuring that out. Tom can put up his hand and tell me that he can hear me, of course. There you go. So that's there. I do have a shared screen if you wanted to take a look at what the web page looks like for that lovely URL that I gave you. So I don't know if there you go. So this is a blog post that talks about the exam, gives you links to some study guides for the two different exams that make up that particular environment. And there's even like a video walkthrough of all the stuff you're going to need to know for this hybrid exam. If you're learning about identity, you're going to learn about active directory on premises and all the stuff you need to be able to set it up and to work with it and manage it. But then you're also going to learn about the Azure active directory as well and how that ties in between the two different systems. You're going to learn about networking. You're going to then also learn about hybrid networking back and forth into Azure as well. So that's the whole purpose behind what's particular exam, two sets of exams that make up the certification together. It will be going beta later in the fall, early winter timeframe. So keep your eyes open for that. The best place for details about this is going to be my team's blog, which is at itopstalk.com to be able to go off and stay up to date with all the goodness that's happening inside that certification. Overdo finally in the right position to be able to do this now with hybrid capabilities and also with getting all the different connectivity between all those different services in the right space to be able to finally come out with a role based certification, not a product based certification for Windows server administrators. And the main one might be working because I had the mute button turned on and I'm a media. Hello, 2021. You're on mute. Yeah, that is it. Well, I don't know if you're aware, but I've obviously got quite annoying builders out of my window hammering and every once in a while there was a hammer thing. So I was pressing the mute button every time they're hammering, I was pressing mute so that you didn't get interrupted. And then, and then the browser closed, and then I was like, long story short, we're back. And we now know, thanks to Rick, because he's amazing, I've lived with a super professional that actually you can go and get trained on this stuff. So maybe I could do a training course on the mute button. That would be great. We're going to talk, we're going to do the fun bit of the show now. So this is the bit of the show. It's called the meme review, Rick. So we do this every show because basically there are lots of server memes out there. And I obviously am not a system admin administrator type person. You know, I'm a sales guy that works in the UK. And server is growing on me, Rick. Like it gets you. You kind of, you know, you kind of start off going like, this is complicated. And then going, oh, that's really cool. And then once people start talking about clusters, containers, Kubernetes, you know, like all the kind of cool stuff we've got going on. Like, you know, like different types of all sorts of amazing things like security are just like, I get very excited. I'm actually getting excited about what we can do with, you know, with all this technology, but I still don't really understand what these memes are about. So you will understand what they're about. And the producers of this show will save you from embarrassment for me, not be able to use the mute button. And hopefully it's not one that says something about muting because that would just be too funny. I don't think that's clever. But let's find out what the first meme is. Let's see what that's all about. What, Rick, what is this saying to you? Yeah, Microsoft is known as compatibility kingdom because we tried to, we bent over backwards to make sure that we make everything as backwards compatible as possible. So I literally have used every single one of these different connectors just to be able to get to a particular end device. So you can literally see on there a parallel connector talking to a VGA, talking to a keyboard connector, eventually talking to a USB key. So it's all happening. Yeah, so that's like a USB PS2. That's PS2 to, is that, is it serial? I think it's serial. I don't know if it's VGA. It is serial. Looking at the flow, but that's going to be a serial. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's got serial to parallel. That's a parallel. Yeah. And that's like, because that's like the old printer cable connector that you'd have like back in the day. All this to be able to get access to the favorite pictures of Ned Piles dogs that he keeps on. We all know Ned Piles dogs are and those pictures are in high regard. Yeah. So anyway, so that, that is, yeah, there is no such thing as not compatible. And that's true. I think that's actually right. What's even more interesting is this is on a rack mounted server. So this would have to stick out the back of the rack because it's so long. It would stick out the back of the rack and so on. But the only thing I can tell is this is not in a server room because that is a lovely piece of walnut dash that they put up. So that's, you know, I know many customers that actually use their server room still. So that's, that's fine. But in a microcosm of dead, I always say this to be one because people say to me, oh, look, you know, because sometimes you get like, I'm digressing it. You might get like Apple fanboys or you might get like people say this is people say, like, why do you love like Microsoft? Why do you love that? Right. And for me, it's actually about choice. It's, you know, like, if, if, like whatever flavor you want, you go get it and do it your own way and figure it out. And that, that for me is exactly this picture epitomizes that ability to be able to do whatever you want with a Windows ecosystem right there. That's beautiful. And as far as I'm concerned. Right. Okay. So we're going to do, we're going to do mean number two. So forget that mean. Yep. Mean two. Harder reset. Jesus. Oh, my, when I got it, when, when I was learning about this industry, but my, my dad is actually used to be a professor at university. And that's how they introduced the computers way, way, way, way back when. And he always used to tell me about what he used to call a BRS reset. Have you heard of the BRS reset before? BRS. What does the BRS stand for? Big red switch. You can, you can turn around to the back of the PC and just turn it off and turn it back on again as a hard reset or a BRS reset. And as opposed to a soft reset, which is just the three, the three finger salute control. This obviously is definitely a harder reset for sure. Because just take a freaking hammer to it. And that definitely resets the box. I would actually use this more so for drive and data protection destruction. Right. You're decommissioning a server. Got to have a whole bunch of old hard drives. Got to worry about. That's when I would take the harder reset tool to go in and make sure that data is not recoverable anymore. I think that's essential. For me, it's, you know, like a BFG in doom or something, right? This is like the BFH. It's the BFH hammer. That's what it is. So harder reset. Perfect. So we all need a hammer. Sometimes it's hammer time and you need a hammer. So that's when we need a harder reset. Perfect. So let's just summarize real quick. And look, HCI. HCI is really the convergence of hybrid and infrastructure, all happening with everything you need. This is the moment in time where Windows Server 2022 is landing with all of these things available to give people every flavor of what they want when they want it. And so, you know, you were saying that people have got to get the right thing at the right time for the right scalability of what they need. Is there anything else in there that you think people should know? You're leaving thought on Azure Stack HCI. What's the Rick wisdom? Yeah. So you alluded to it beforehand. I think it was before you did the mute. Maybe it was after you did the mute. I forget when it was. But so Azure Stack HCI is the piece that allows you to connect up into Azure. It allows you to manage your systems and gives you highly available capabilities. The one part that I didn't talk about as of yet, which is just kind of there just to kind of blow your mind. Services coming down to Azure Stack HCI, not just you leveraging services from Azure, but you mentioned the K word, Kubernetes. We've announced during the server summit and also we talked about it during other things leading up to this. This isn't any news. Azure Stack HCI gives you the ability to deploy a fully managed Azure Kubernetes services from Azure on your local box. So you now have Kubernetes that is completely managed for you that you can now deploy for your development teams to go off and explore how to do containerization, modernize applications. You don't need to go and read 17,000 different web pages to figure out how to stand up your own on-premises Kubernetes implementation. You literally deploy Azure Stack HCI. You then bring down and install through the webinar face. You install Azure Kubernetes services or AKS from Microsoft on top of it. And it's the exact same view and capabilities of what you saw up inside the Azure world, but it's on-premises for you there. That's the cherry on the cake, if you will. Cherry on the ice cream to say why take a look at Azure Stack HCI. It's not just virtualization. It's not just storage. It's also these new services coming down that you can now run on-premises, but still have connectivity and management capabilities back in the Azure world. See, I knew this was going to be a great episode, even though I managed to mute myself, I managed to turn off the connection and the video got locked. I knew that I was working with a professional and Rick would be able to fix this for me. So, Rick, thank you very much. Everybody, thank you for tuning in to that episode from the Rock to the Cloud. I think you'll agree we've been very, very lucky to have Rick Claus with us. Which way do you spell that, Rick? C-L-A-U-S, just like Santa. Rick Claus. Yeah, just like Santa. And you know what? Rick has delivered. That's all I will say. So, thanks very much for tuning into this episode. If any of you watching want to find out a particular thing or talk to an expert about a subject around server, please do drop us a comment or get in touch. You know who I am. It's not a secret, but feel free to get in touch and tell us what your question is for the Rock to the Cloud. And thank you very much today. And Rick, it's been a pleasure having you and I'm hoping we'll see you again soon. Nice. Cheers.