On September 26^th, 2023, Dell announced a new cloud platform intended to bring the cloud experience provided by the most relevant hyperscalers to on-premises. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure became the first in a group of platforms to facilitate modern application development and operation.

This new offer has become the first in the market for a new category – Premier Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.

In this day and age, it’s highly probable that most customers when asked about their preferred way to learn about a new product or technology will select a hands-on experience, which is why we are excited to announce that a new interactive demo (ITD-0235) has been posted in our demo center catalog: Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure.

Featuring a hands-on experience with the management and orchestration capabilities delivered by Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software, this interactive journey will guide us through the following topics:

• Platform introduction
• Deployment experience
• Fleet management
• Serviceability features
• Security management
• Lifecycle management
• Cluster expansion operations

The first steps explore the platform architecture displayed in Figure 1, founded upon the multicloud (MC) nodes and based on Dell PowerEdge R660 and R760 servers. The latest release of Azure Stack HCI is installed on these servers, including its storage and network components.

With the addition of the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) hybrid, we are on-board to onboard our Azure Stack HCI clusters into the Azure Arc portal, resulting in a true hybrid Azure environment.

Figure 1. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure base architecture

By utilizing the automated, wizard-driven process backed up by the Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software, you can cut down on the multitude of manual steps to deploy the advanced architecture of the Azure hybrid cloud environments by up to 88%.

Note: At initial release, this platform is only installable through Dell ProDeploy Services, however this automation will soon be made available for public use.

The wizard will guide us through a series of steps, including approving the End User License Agreement, fulfilling installation prerequisites, choosing a configuration method, and providing key Azure account parameters, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 2. Cloud Platform deployment through automated wizard, featuring the first configuration steps

Day 1 Deployment and Cluster Creation

Next, the interactive experience will go through the infrastructure resource selection process, beginning with servers, storage, and networking assets. Typical global settings such as cluster name, DNS, LDAPs, and Active Directory are configured next. We will then be prompted to identify a Windows Admin Center instance to install Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software extension, thus creating a powerful console for cluster management operations.

Configuring the APEX Cloud Platform Manager – the overall management engine for Dell APEX Cloud platforms – is the next step we will undertake. Credentials must be provided for the different users enabled in this engine.

The interactive experience will guide us through basic configuration steps for the three domains: Compute (Servers), Network, and Storage (through a specific network intent dedicated to storage traffic) as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3. Network and Storage intents configuration steps

Once everything is completed, a validation check is run to ensure a fully supported and consistent configuration has been provided and all environmental requirements have been met.

Upon successful execution of the validation check, the demo will display how the deployment process progresses. Once finalized, we can connect to Windows Admin Center to see the details of the newly deployed platform.

Figure 4. Windows Admin Center view of the newly deployed cluster

As a true hybrid environment, we can also verify that the new cluster has been onboarded to Azure Arc and can be managed from there.

Figure 5. New Azure Stack HCI cluster onboarded into the Azure portal

Fleet Management At-Scale

The next demo module will guide us through the capabilities offered by Azure Monitor to the newly onboarded cluster, including key metrics, health, and usage information.

As part of the deployment process, Azure Arc-connected Machine agents are installed on each of the cluster nodes, thus becoming Azure Arc-enabled server hybrid machines.

The installation of these agents is not sufficient to have the new cluster visible within Azure Monitor. The demo will walk through the necessary steps to complete this process and allow monitoring our cluster using Azure Stack HCI cluster insights, as shown in the following dashboard.

Figure 6. Azure Stack HCI cluster now monitored through Azure Monitor capabilities

From the cluster global health to the Virtual Machine or physical drives status across all your Azure platforms, a host of new monitoring capabilities have been made available and ready to use.

Fleet management at scale has been delivered by following these simple steps, creating a new and consistent hybrid management experience through the APEX Cloud Platform.

Dell Support Integrations and ServiceabilityProviding an automated deployment experience is key to the platform, however we have gone beyond that, making the support experience for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure as smooth and rich as possible through a set of Serviceability features:

• Secure connection for sending telemetry, creating service requests, and providing remote support
• Event management and Call-Home
• Log bundle collection

This guided journey will walk through how to enable these features through our Windows Admin Center extension and the APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software.

Security Management

After reviewing these enhanced support capabilities, we will address the intrinsic infrastructure security management features built within Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure.

All of these security features come out-of-the-box with Azure Stack HCI, providing a platform protected against current and future security threats.

The two main security features shown in the demo are:

• Infrastructure lock
• Secured-core server

Infrastructure Lock is a feature of Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software. The Dell APEX Cloud Platform extension in Windows Admin Center provides a toggle switch that enables and disables the System Lockdown feature of Dell iDRAC on a cluster-wide basis.

Enabling this feature on all the nodes in an Azure Stack HCI cluster protects against unintentional or malicious changes to critical configuration settings in the BIOS or iDRAC and prevents unapproved updates of BIOS, iDRAC, firmware, and drivers.

Figure 7. System showing Lockdown mode enabled, disabling iDRAC and BIOS configuration changes

The other main security feature exposed in the demo, secured-core server, helps protecting against attacks that try to establish a hardware root-of-trust. This feature must be enabled at both the BIOS and Operating system level. This is done during the initial platform deployment of APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure.

Figure 8. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure showing all nodes protected via secured-core server

Full Stack Lifecycle Management

Once the platform has been deployed, and we have seen the serviceability and security features, it is time to look at lifecycle management. Full stack lifecycle management is of outmost relevance to keep the platform running at optimal performance and resiliency levels.

In this demo, we can see how easy it is to keep the platform in a Continuously Validated State using a guided, wizard-driven workflow in Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software.

The process will go through a series of steps and validation operations that will lead to the cluster update, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Detailed dashboard for Azure Stack HCI cluster update as from Windows Admin Center view

When all the steps have been successfully completed, the cluster update process details are shown in an informational pane, as seen in the following figure.

Figure 10. Azure Stack HCI cluster update successfully completed

We can check that the newly updated cluster is compliant with the desired Known Good States through a Dell APEX Cloud Platform Compliance report, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 11. Azure Stack HCI cluster compliance report showing a fully compliant cluster

Rapid Cluster Expansion

For Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, it is essential that customers be able to start with only the amount of hardware needed for the initial workloads, allowing them to address business demands as they increase. For that reason, we have implemented an automated workflow to add a node to an existing Azure Stack HCI cluster within the APEX Cloud Platform Foundation software. The final demo in this interactive experience will guide us through a cluster expansion operation.

We will start with a two-node cluster that is intended to host a new business application. In order to address the new performance and capacity needs, an additional MC node must be added.

After all checks are run against the new node and compatibility with the existing cluster is determined, we are ready to start the expansion process.

There are also a number of validation tests shown in Figure 12 that are run to verify cluster integrity and stability in order to check that the cluster adheres to configuration best practices for the network, storage, security, and virtualization domains. With these, we establish that workload performance and cluster resiliency will not be compromised by the expansion process, as well as ensure consistency and standardization across the newly expanded cluster.

Figure 12. New node validation process run before adding a new server to an existing Azure Stack HCI cluster

As a final validation, we can visualize through the Dell APEX Cloud Platform integration with Windows Admin Center that the new node has been successfully added to the existing two-node Azure Stack HCI cluster, as illustrated in the following figure.

Figure 13. Physical view of the expanded Azure Stack HCI cluster

This will conclude the interactive experience offered by this demo, highlighting the efficiency and automation of the process of deploying and operating a Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure powered by Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software.

Resources

• Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure interactive demo, ITD-0235
• Dell Demo Center Catalog
• Info Hub: Dell APEX Cloud Platforms
• YouTube playlist with educational and demo videos – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2nlzNk2-VMEkNM7E8m0ia_lLHWlOuT5h 
• Main product page with spec sheets, solution briefs, infographics, and other great collateral – https://www.dell.com/azure 

Author: Inigo Olcoz, Multicloud and HCI Technical Marketing

@VirtualOlcoz