Equipment:

Dell R820 w/ dual socket 8 core xeon (16 cores total), 32GB RAM, 4 x 250GB - $800 +96GB RAM - $???

Software:

  1. Windows Server 2016 – Jan ’17 Release (MSDN Subscriber’s Downloads)
  2. Azure Stack Technical Preview 1 – Apr ’16 Release (MSDN Subscriber’s Downloads)

Step 1: Prepare the OS

I bought this R820 from a local dealer on the cheap. It came with no OS so I had to setup the RAID and install Windows Server on it. I read in this article that you should install Azure Stack on top of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview so when I logged into the MSDN Subscribers portal and saw that Windows Server 2016 had released I decided to try and go with that.