Standalone Microsoft Connected Cache for Enterprise is now GA – Part 1

Around two weeks ago, Microsoft announced the Connected Cache for Enterprise is now finally generally available: Microsoft Connected Cache is now generally available – Windows IT Pro Blog In Part 1 I will cover how you can migrate your preview nodes to GA.

Migration from public preview

If you already have your Connected Cache servers deployed during the public preview, you will need to redeploy them to be able to continue use them:

As you can see, a new column appeared in the portal, stating if the node was migrated or is still running the preview version.

Redeploy Linux Node

Redeployment of the Linux node is pretty much the same as the initial deployment. We just download the new deployment scripts from the portal:

Copy it to the node and unzip the content and mark the initial script as executable:

And start the deployment by running the install command from the portal:

Redeploy Windows Node

The Windows setup has changed a little bit from the preview, instead of downloading a zip file containing the scripts, it now contains a msixbundle:

We again copy it to the windows node and start the installation from an elevated PowerShell window:

First thing we should do is to enable Hyper-V if not yet done. To start the deployment, we need to set $user with the Account name and the credentials in variable “$myLocalAccountCredential”. We can use the PowerShell commandlet Get-Credential for that.
For my demo, I will use the local Administrator account, in a productive environment, you should use a separate account for this:

Then finally we just copy the install command from the portal and start the deployment:

Once the deployment is completed, we can see the nodes are marked as “migrated” in the portal and we are good to go:

Conclusion

The Microsoft Connected Cache is a great addition to every bigger deployment and can significantly reduce the required internet bandwidth by caching the content locally for all your clients. In Part 2 I will cover how you can enable HTTPS support for your Connected Caches, since the Intune CDNs will require HTTPS in the next months.