AKS on Azure Stack HCI - November 2021 update

Hello friends,

The AKS on Azure Stack HCI November update is available! So you all are aware, this is going to be the last planned AKS on Azure Stack HCI update for 2021.  We will resume our regular monthly schedule in January 2022.

As always, you can also evaluate AKS-HCI any time by registering here. If you do not have the hardware handy to evaluate AKS on Azure Stack HCI you can follow our guide for evaluating AKS-HCI inside an Azure VM:  https://aka.ms/aks-hci-evalonazure.

Here are some of the changes you'll see in the November update:

Windows Admin Center version 2110 is available

You may have heard at Ignite that Windows Admin Center version 2110 is now generally available!

2110 comes with several core changes that will benefit AKS on AzureStack HCI, however, I'm personally excited about improvements in the CredSSP flow. Cluster creation and updates will be more reliable and easier from a networking permissions perspective with this update.

Please be sure to update Windows Admin Center if when you updated AKS on AzureStack HCI this release, if you haven't already.

Bring your own load balancer

We've had a number of people ask for load balancer options besides the default HAProxy load balancer, primarily MetalLB. Starting in November, you can create clusters with no load balancer and then set up an in-cluster load balancer of your choice.

We will, of course, continue deploying HAProxy pre-configured by default but now with the flexibility to support other options as well.

Increasing physical node support from 4 nodes to 8 nodes

AKS on AzureStack HCI supports deployments on up to 8 physical nodes which makes it easier to run AKS on AzureStack deployments with a wider variety of Azure Stack HCI hardware and to scale up your deployment with confidence.
 

November documentation updates

November is a another big month for documentation.  We published some new docs to support new features, as usual, however we also published more short-term helper guides and instructions for integrating with existing open source tools from the Kubernetes ecosystem. 

New documentation that provides instructions for Kubernetes concepts: 

• Backup and restore workload clusters using Velero and Azure Blob storage
• How to use and create ReplicaSets for pods
• Connect to the Azure Key Vault provider using the Kubernetes Secrets Store CSI Driver integration

New documentation for AKS on Azure Stack HCI, specifically:

• Instructions for setting up multiple administrators
• Deploy an AKS host with prestaged cluster service objects and DNS records using PowerShell
• Configure and use a custom load balancer guide + supporting PowerShell cmdlets

Doc updates worth mentioning:

• Updated the list of URLs required for AKS-HCI to install and run.
• Updated all of our support statements to include Windows Server 2022

Once you have downloaded and installed the AKS on Azure Stack HCI November 2021 Update – you can report any issues you encounter and track future feature work on our GitHub Project at  https://github.com/Azure/aks-hci. And, if you do not have the hardware handy to evaluate AKS on Azure Stack HCI you can follow our guide for evaluating AKS-HCI inside an Azure VM:  https://aka.ms/aks-hci-evalonazure.

I look forward to hearing from you all!

Cheers,

Sarah