Home > APEX > Cloud Platforms > Guides > Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure Tech Book > Day 1 Operations Cluster Deployment
Although providing a fully automated end-to-end Day 1 deployment and cluster creation experience is a common feature for all APEX Cloud Platform, the way it is delivered in the Azure space has its unique implications.
At its initial launch, in September 2023, Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure in not customer installable. Dell offers a white-glove deployment experience via Dell ProDeploy Services to make the process smooth and successful.
This deployment experience will be made available soon for customers to drive.
The whole deployment process is initiated when the Cloud Platform Manager VM in automatically spawned in one of the MultiCloud (MC) nodes that conform to the Cloud Platform initial cluster. It gets a default IP assigned, so we can browse to that IP and see the Day 1 deployment wizard appear.
Accepting the End User License Agreement is the first requirement to complete. Once done we can start the process by fulfilling deployment prerequisites:
We can select the number of servers we want to use to build this first cluster, but our engineering tests have proved that initially creating a cluster with one to six nodes provides the most expedient and consistent deployment experience.
The automated cluster expansion workflow in our APEX Cloud Platform extension in Windows Admin Center can be used to scale out to a maximum cluster size of 16 nodes once the cluster is up and running.
The Wizard driven deployment will inquire for typical infrastructure Global Settings such as cluster name, DNS, LDAPs, Active Directory or Dell’s Windows Admin Center Extension configuration and Azure Arc registration.
If Dell’s extension did not exist in Windows Admin Center, it can be selected the option for its automated install here:
The automated process continues configuring the Cloud Platform Manager VM credentials, then the servers name and IP settings for the APEX Cloud Platform initial cluster.
Microsoft Network ATC greatly simplifies host network configuration for Azure Stack HCI clusters using an intent-based approach.
In this sample shown, we setup a non-converged network topology creating two intents. Using the integrated Ethernet adapter ports for management and compute traffic and an additional PCI adapter for storage traffic.
The wizard driven process allows the user to configure other important network settings such as SR-IOV, jumbo frame size, and RDMA implementation. The last network configuration step will be to provide VLAN IDs for the storage subnets and configure the cluster IP addressing information.
We can perform a final live validation through the Validate Configuration option to confirm the data provided is aligned with the rules and best practices proven by our engineering organization to ensure a smooth deployment and cluster creation experience.
Any errors identified at this point can be corrected going back step-by-step to where they were found.
The deployment can take a few hours to run depending on the initial cluster size. During the deployment, we can observe all steps a manual installation would require, and that are automated through this process. There are over 50 steps streaming by in the View Details window. That translates into considerable time savings.
When the deployment process has successfully completed, we can connect to Windows Admin Center. From there we can perform granular, cluster-level Day 2 operational tasks to administer Dell APEX Cloud Platforms for Microsoft Azure.
The automation registered the new Azure Stack HCI cluster and onboarded the cluster-nodes to Azure Arc-enabled servers.