Home > APEX > Cloud Platforms > Guides > Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure Tech Book > The Solution sizing and Configuration
With APEX Cloud Platforms, customers do not have to spend valuable time with architecture and engineering planning to run workloads. The common infrastructure building blocks are already tested and validated with a broad range of configurations ready to meet the requirements of even the most demanding applications. However, to determine the right-sized system that achieves the best return on investment, it is essential to understand the performance and capacity characteristics of your existing environment.
Dell Technologies follows a consultative and systematic approach to help customers modernize their data estate. Dell Live Optics is a free, online software tool used to collect, visualize, and share data about existing IT infrastructures and workloads.
Optical Prime is an agent that gets installed on-premises that collects metrics like peak CPU utilization, IOPS, used storage, and average daily writes from various operating systems. Optical Prime also comes bundled with workload collectors to gather critical information directly from the application layer.
Figure 50. Live Optics free tool gathers critical information about the running workloads to help right sizing the new Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure
As explained in previous chapters, Dell APEX Cloud Platforms inherit key Dell technologies that have proven successful and effective. That is also the case of the sizing tool, Dell PowerSizer. This tool, internal to Dell and its partners, is able to generate best performing and cost optimal configurations for Dell APEX Cloud Platforms based in MC-660 and 760 nodes. It can create full NVMe, All-Flash, and hybrid configurations of any sizing scenario allowing to save multiple revisions of them.
Figure 51. Dell internal (and partners) sizing tool for Dell APEX Cloud Platforms
For these APEX Cloud Platforms, this sizing tool inherits years of sizing experiences and Intellectual Property of Dell leading HCI platform, VxRail.
The sizing workflow follows a series of steps that end up with an optimal quote for that meets all the performance and capacity requirements, with the lower cost:
Figure 52. Dell APEX Cloud Platform sizing workflow overview
The output from the tool ensures the configurations generated are balanced and viable. This output includes a minimum and recommended cluster configuration that meets the workloads’ requirements in terms of performance, capacity, resiliency, and future growth within the scope of the project’s budget.
Figure 53. Sample proposed configuration for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, based in 11 MC-660 All NVMe nodes, with Three-way mirror, and 512 GB of RAM per node.