Life cycle management is critical to maintaining peak performance and reliability on the DBaaS platform. Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for Microsoft Windows Admin Center provides 1-click full-stack life cycle management with Cluster-Aware Updating at the ASHCLUSTER cluster layer. Using a simple workflow in Admin Center, we orchestrated the operating system, BIOS, firmware, and driver updates without any interruption to the SQL databases running HammerDB TPC-C workloads. This was because Cluster-Aware Updating Live Migrated the AKS-HCI 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 needed on ASHCLUSTER.

Figure 39.    First step of full stack LCM 

Next, the Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for Microsoft Windows Admin Center snap-in to the Microsoft Cluster-Aware Updating extension revealed the hardware updates part of the workflow. After some 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 is 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 40.    Hardware update compliance report

The complete update of the cluster took approximately 4.5 hours. The updates to the nodes were performed in a rolling fashion. Each cluster node being updated was first paused, and all the AKS-HCI VMs were moved to another online node. There was no interruption to the HammerDB TPC-C workloads running against the SQL MIs during this entire process. After the updates were complete, we found all the AKS-HCI workload cluster node VMs were evenly distributed across the physical nodes without any manual intervention.