Applications thrive and proliferate swiftly in our technology-driven world, which places a heavy burden on IT departments that are expected to keep up with that frantic pace. This reality necessitates intensive use of dev/ops environments, often a sweet spot for cloud platforms. Multi-cloud scenarios are commonly adopted to avoid being tied to a single cloud provider; however, each cloud platform has its own management tools and requires different base knowledge. Working on different cloud platforms makes having global visibility of your IT assets a very complex task and implementing a holistic security and compliance policy even harder.

Dell APEX Cloud Platforms facilitate multicloud adoption by bringing cloud stacks to data center, co-location, and edge environments, accomplished by providing turnkey platforms designed from a set of common building blocks that help reduce IT workloads, speed deployment, control costs, and manage end of life of assets sustainably.

 Figure 1. Dell APEX Cloud Platforms: Empowering hybrid cloud innovation

Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure--one of the offerings within the broader APEX portfolio--allows customers to extend their Microsoft ecosystem on-premises. This new platform ensures consistent operations and governance across data centers, edge locations, and Azure public cloud. The innovative Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software communicates with the underlying platform and integrates automated workflows into Microsoft Windows Admin Center via our APEX Cloud Platform extension, providing a common and familiar management platform to centralize operations for dispersed Azure deployments.

Figure 2. Dell Cloud Platform Foundation Software capabilities

Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure supports at launch two hardware platforms:

• Dell MC-660 nodes (1U)
• Dell MC-760 nodes (2U)

Both platforms are equipped with dual socket Intel Sapphire Rapids processors, 4 TB of DDR5 memory, and a wide range of NVMe, SAS, and Nearline SAS drives as storage options.

The following figure shows in detail the MC-660 supported hardware for both All Flash and NVMe configurations.

Figure 3. Dell MC-660 nodes for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure

Dell MC-760 nodes expand the storage and GPU capabilities for the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 4. Dell MC-760 nodes for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure

With these two powerful platforms, you can handle a broad range of business workloads, from accelerating the adoption of your hybrid cloud project or transactional databases to hosting virtual desktops, AI/ML analytics, or containerized cloud native applications.

These MC nodes can be combined into different cluster topologies, heavily dependent on the host’s storage network configuration.

We can start with the smallest approach provided by single node architectures. We will expand on this use case later.

The next step in cluster complexity is the two-node architecture, a switchless option that avoids investing in Top of the Rack (ToR) switches or consuming existing storage ports. It is based in a mesh configuration between the two nodes with connection to client switches for host management and Virtual Machines (VM-1,2) traffic. This is a non-converged network configuration, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 5. Storage on physical links in a non-converged topology with two NIC ports

Storage 1 and 2 represent the physical connections to the storage. Through a Switch Embedded Team (SET), Management and VM traffic are routed to their proper destinations.

To expand the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure cluster size beyond the 2 nodes, we must implement a scalable network configuration. This option supports anywhere from 2 to 16 MC nodes and uses ToR switches for management and storage traffic networking.

These architectures support both fully converged and non-converged network topologies:

• Fully converged -- All storage ports from each node are connected to the same network fabric. Within the Azure Stack HCI OS, the NIC ports are used for both storage and management/VM traffic.
• Non-converged -- Storage traffic is separated from the management/VM traffic using dedicated storage network adapters, as shown in figure 5.

The scalable network topology allows for future cluster expansion as business needs grow.

Single node clusters

Single node Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure deployments are a highly convenient solution for scenarios in which cost and power/space consumption are more relevant than highly resilient systems. This is a very common assumption in today’s Edge and Remote Office/Branch Office scenarios.

Figure 6. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure single-node deployments

Through Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software, we can easily deploy our single node environments in the same way we do with multi-node architectures.

In terms of workload placement, single node scenarios are able to host the same type of workloads as any other multi-node architecture with the performance limitations that one node can provide.

Whatever the deployment may be (single or multi-node, converged or non-converged), it is key that the proper hardware resources are configured to provide the best performance to the hosted business workloads.

Dell sales team have at their disposal a newly created Configuration and Sizing tool that has been designed to inherit the core technology of the existing configuration and sizing tool, thus accumulating 1000s of hours of configuration experience and real-life feedback from 100s of past sizing opportunities.

We can also use Live Optics, a free online software used to collect, visualize, and share data on IT environments and workloads, to feed the decisions made during the sizing process to better reflect the real needs of a customer scenario.

Using such a set of tools ensures you receive the optimal platform to host your Azure workloads.

Figure 7. Dell proprietary configuration and sizing tool for Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure

Conclusion

With Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, customers can leverage Dell’s innovation in terms of automated Management and Operations to extend and optimize Microsoft Azure ecosystems on-premises, maintaining a familiar operational and developer experience.

Resources

We have tons of great content to help you deep-dive into Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure powered by Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software. 

• InfoHub (White Papers, Blogs, Interactive Journey, and more) –  https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/t/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 
• Dell Support site with administrator guides –        https://www.dell.com/support/home/en/product-support/product/apex-cloud-pf-ms-azure/docs 

And as always, please reach out to your Dell account team if you would like to have more in-depth discussions about the Dell APEX Cloud Platforms family. If you don’t currently have a Dell contact, we’re here to help on our corporate website.

Author: Inigo Olcoz, Senior Principal Engineer Technologist, Dell HCI Technical Marketing

Twitter: @VirtualOlcoz