Important developments in the new edition of Microsoft Inspire, Microsoft’s most important annual partner event that has brought together the entire conglomerate of partners made up of more than 400,000 ICT service companies, consultants, integrators, ISVs and hardware manufacturers.
In this year’s edition, the technological giant has taken the opportunity to launch three novelties: the presentation of a preview before the imminent arrival of Azure Stack HCI 22H2, Azure Remote Support, and Marketplace.
Azure Stack HCI 22H2 will be the first major update to the platform since it happened on 21H2 last year. This is a program that allows customers to install the next version of the operating system before its official release. It is primarily intended for customers who want to evaluate new features, also for system architects who want to build solutions prior to a broader deployment, and for general users who want to introduce what’s new in Azure Stack HCI. It’s important to remember that preview builds they are available through Windows Update using Windows Admin Center or PowerShell.
For those unfamiliar with it, do not confuse Azure Stack HCI with Azure Stack. Since HCI, it stands for hyper-converged infrastructure and aims to target users who don’t want to jump into Microsoft’s wholesale cloud with a hybrid environment that combines on-premises infrastructure with Azure.
More news: Azure Remote Support and the Marketplace
As for Azure Remote Support and the Marketplace, administrators themselves can provide Azure engineers with access to a local cluster to address issues and collect logs. And it is that, although the functionality is disabled by default, once enabled, engineers can only execute cmdlets approved by the Just Enough Administration (JEA)” for activities for auditing purposes and with access that can be revoked at any time.
The arrival of Azure Marketplace is another novelty, in the form of a public preview, throughout the coming fall. A great benefit for administrators of Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI enabled virtual environments. The integration will give access to the latest fully patched images from Microsoft, and the intention is to add images from third-party publishers in the future. In fact, when the public preview appears, it will work with an Azure Stack HCI cluster running 21H2 or 22H2.
