AKS on Azure Stack HCI - February 2022 update

Hi All,

The February update of AKS on Azure Stack HCI is now available!  This month's release is full of reliability updates.

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 this update:

Improved reliability when updating hosts from Azure Stack HCI 20H2 to Azure Stack HCI 21H2

This release comes with a fix for an intermittent issue reported in GitHub issues #150 and #171. This issue was causing AKS-HCI deployments running on Azure Stack HCI 20H2 to reach a bad state after updating the host OS to Azure Stack HCI 21H2.

Improved performance and stability by updating resource reservations

We have seen a handful of issues caused by insufficient resource capacity for system components in worker nodes. In this release, both Linux and Windows worker nodes will reserve additional resource capacity for these components.

Change in the default value for the FsGroupPolicy API

This release contains a change in the default value for fsGroupPolicy where the CSIDriver object now uses the File value instead of the ReadWriteOnceWithFSType value. Previously, customers needed to create a custom storage class and add a parameter (fsType=ext4) to run workloads that specify an fsGroup when configuring a pod’s security context. This enhancement works for deployments running on Kubernetes versions v1.20.x and above and will apply to all storage classes. Read this blog post for more information.

Containerd container runtime support for Windows Worker Nodes in preview

Beginning in Kubernetes v1.22.1, you can use containerd as the container runtime for Windows Worker Nodes in preview. While Docker remains the default runtime for Windows Worker Nodes for now, it will be removed in Kubernetes v1.24. Follow the steps here to use the preview.

Documentation

As usual, new troubleshooting docs were published for various scenarios:

• Update of host OS HCI to HCIv2 breaks AKS-HCI installation
• Transport: Error while dialing dial unix /var/run/moc-kms-plugin/kmsPlugin.sock: connect: no such file or directory
• Error: invalid_client. The provided client secret keys are expired

Once you have installed or updated to the AKS on Azure Stack HCI February 2022 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 again, 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.

We look forward to hearing from you all!

Cheers,

Markos