Direct would spread the data over multiple hosts to increase resiliency.Microsoft has full documentation on the deployment at
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-stack-poc/. The
good news is that although this may seem intimidating, the deployment consists of
running a script that creates all of the VMs for you. Your only obligation is to follow
the requirements and prerequisites to the letter and, after a few hours, you will have
an Azure Stack deployment that you can start playing with. Note that at time of this
writing, Azure Stack is in its infancy at Technical Preview 1; I expect many things to
change as Azure Stack evolves to its GA state in 2017.
Additional management actions are required with Azure Stack, since it does run on
premises and no separate vendor is looking after the fabric. This is part of the
administration experience and a core part of the Azure Stack solution and doesn’t
require additional add-ons for management. In fact, I expect Azure Stack to be locked
down specifically to block adding software to its core fabric.
What does Azure Stack look like? See Figure 9.19. It looks like the modern Azure
portal. You authenticate with an Azure AD or AD credential (via federation),
depending on your deployment. As a service administrator, you will craft various
offers and plans that contain sets of services and quotas that are then purchased by
tenants to use in their subscriptions.
Figure 9.19 The Azure Stack portal experience
Types of Deployment
The previous section described a single-box deployment of Azure Stack: All of the VMs
and the services that are created run on a single node. This is one of the two