If you manage Azure Local clusters (or any Windows Failover Cluster with Hyper-V and Cluster Shared Volumes), you’ve probably noticed that CSV ownership doesn’t always stay perfectly balanced after maintenance, patching, or node reboots. One node can end up owning multiple volumes while others sit idle. This creates unnecessary I/O coordination overhead and can quietly […]
Handling Preinstalled or Outdated OS Images During Azure Arc Registration
If you’re performing an Azure Local deployments on an OEM premier solution, you might run into scenarios where your OS images are preinstalled and a bit outdated. Don’t worry—Microsoft has built-in mechanisms to handle this smoothly during the Arc registration process. In this post, I’ll break it down step by step, drawing from the official […]
Granular RBAC Permissions for Azure Local VMs: Moving Beyond Built-in Roles
If you’ve been working with Azure Local VMs (those Arc-enabled virtual machines running on your on-premises Azure Local clusters), you’ll know that managing user access is an important task. Microsoft provides some good built-in roles, but they often don’t give you the fine-grained control many organisations need. That’s where custom RBAC roles come in handy […]
Deploy an Azure Local Rack Aware Cluster via the Azure Portal
Azure Local now offers even more resiliency with the introduction of Rack Aware clusters. We’ll discuss what a Rack Aware cluster is in more detail below, and this blog is aimed at showing how to deploy a Rack Aware cluster from the Azure Portal. Rack Aware clusters have been in private preview until recently, and […]
Azure Local Solutions Hardware Catalog
Azure Local solutions start with the Azure Local Solutions Hardware Catalog—a comprehensive, validated repository of hardware options designed to simplify your journey into hybrid computing. In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into what the catalog offers, why it matters, and how it can transform your IT operations. What is Azure Local? Before we continue, […]
Disconnected Operations for Azure Local
If you’re diving into the world of hybrid cloud with Azure Local, you’ve probably heard about the Disconnected Operations feature, currently in public preview. This capability is a big deal for organizations needing to deploy and manage Azure Local instances without relying on a connection to the Azure public cloud. Whether you’re dealing with strict […]
Azure Local Support for AI Services: Empowering IoT and RAG Applications
Microsoft Azure is a leading cloud platform that provides robust solutions for building and deploying intelligent applications at scale. Among its offerings, Azure AI services and Azure IoT enable developers to create innovative applications that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). A critical component of Azure’s ecosystem is its support for […]
Azure Arc Gateway for Azure Local
Introduction As organizations increasingly adopt hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, managing distributed infrastructure efficiently while maintaining security and compliance becomes a critical challenge. Microsoft’s Azure Arc Gateway for Azure Local, currently in public preview, addresses this by streamlining network configurations and reducing the complexity of connecting on-premises environments to Azure. This blog explores the Azure Arc […]
Expand Data Disks for Azure Local VMs
Introduction Azure Local virtual machines (VMs), formerly known as Arc VMs, are VMs deployed from Azure via the Azure Resource Bridge (ARB) to Azure Local instances. These VMs are natively Arc-enabled and administrators can manage them using Azure management tools including the Azure portal, the Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, and ARM templates. There are three main […]
Unable to Deploy AKS Clusters on Azure Local Due to Image Issues
Problem I recently encountered an issue where a customer wasn’t able to deploy AKS clusters on Azure Local via Arc. I was able to reproduce the same issue in my lab and it turned out to be a widespread issue. In this blog I will detail the error and provide a work-a-round. The failure message […]