Dell Technologies has validated the integrated system for Azure Stack HCI Stretch Cluster by creating a detailed and prescriptive reference architecture. The Reference Architecture—Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI: Stretched Cluster Deployment provides an overview of the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI operating system and guidance about how to deploy stretched clusters in your environment. A robust set of configurations and different models enables you to customize your infrastructure for application performance, capacity, or deployment location requirements.

For a better understanding of stretch clustering, the following figure shows an example of an eight-node stretched cluster spanned across two different sites, Site A and Site B. Each site has its storage pool of disks, on top of which the volumes are created. Volumes are stretched across the two sites to provide better resiliency.