This post was authored by the Microsoft Azure Stack Team.
Over the course of the last several weeks, we have continued to get a lot of great feedback and questions about Azure Stack. We are seeing some common questions and comments, so we thought it would be a good time to address them and continue our dialogue.
First, a lot of customers have asked us about the next technical preview of Azure Stack. We’ve got good news – we’ve started rolling out Azure Stack Technical Preview 2 (TP2) to some early adopter customers this week. This begins the process of rolling it out more broadly, and we expect to release TP2 publicly later this year.
We have also heard questions around the integrated systems hardware strategy, with concerns around flexibility, cost, and size. So, we asked Vijay Tewari to sit down with us and provide some insights behind our vision and rationale for integrated systems in this short video. The video provides insight into their top engineering design goals, the value of having software tightly connected with specific hardware, and how they ultimately think about lifecycle management of this system. One point worth reemphasizing is the prioritization of integrated systems from Dell, HPE, and Lenovo, as a starting point. As we have done in other cases in the past, we will continue to broaden our support for a diverse hardware ecosystem that allows customer choice and configuration from a certified catalog of solutions.
Finally, we know customers want to protect their investment in the turnkey Cloud Platform System (CPS) from Dell, HPE, and Nutanix, as well as more general deployments of Windows Azure Pack (WAP). We are working on side-by-side integration between CPS/WAP and Azure Stack, which will allow users to seamlessly manage Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) resources, created in WAP, from within the Azure Stack portal. In this way customers can use these Azure-consistent cloud solutions now, and leverage those resources in Azure Stack deployments in the future.
Let’s keep up the discussion!
