Life cycle management is critical to maintaining peak performance and reliability on the DBaaS platform. Dell OpenManage Integration for Microsoft Windows Admin Center provided 1-click full-stack life cycle management with Cluster-Aware Updating at the a7525r06c01 cluster layer. Using a simple workflow in Windows Admin Center, we orchestrated the operating system, BIOS, firmware, and driver updates without any interruption to the SQL databases running HammerDB workloads. This was because Cluster-Aware Updating Live Migrated the AKS hybrid control plane and workload cluster node VMs during the process.  

The first step in the workflow was to go to Updates Tool in Windows Admin Center. The following figure displays the operating system updates that were required on a7525r06c01.             

Figure 35.    First step of full stack LCM

After prerequisite checks to ensure hardware compatibility, a compliance report was generated to determine which components were out of compliance against the Azure Stack HCI solution catalog. This catalog was populated with BIOS, firmware, and drivers that are validated by Dell Technologies engineering to provide optimal performance and reliability on Azure Stack HCI clusters. The following figure displays the results of our compliance report.    

Figure 36.    Hardware update compliance report

The complete update of the cluster took approximately 2 hours. The updates to the nodes were performed in a rolling fashion. For each node being updated, the extension placed the node into maintenance mode, migrated off all clustered roles, installed the updates, and restarted the node. Then, the node was resumed, and all clustered roles were moved back. We observed no interruption to the HammerDB TPCC-like workloads running against the SQL MIs during this entire process.