Overview

Dell Technologies node expansion focuses on increasing the capacity of an existing solution that is powered by a Dell EMC Integrated System (hybrid or all-flash SU). Node expansion offers flexibility to existing customers to increase their capacity in homogenous increments of either a single node, multiple single nodes, a set of four nodes, or multiple sets of four nodes. Each new SU node must be homogenous with the nodes present in the existing stack, which means that it has the same CPU type, memory, disk number, and disk size. Customers can expand their capacity up to 16 SU nodes.

Node expansion for the solution is an automated process. Full details are available in the Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub Customer Node Expansion Guide.

Node expansion workflow

The following figure shows the workflow of customer delivery and deployment of node expansion for the Dell EMC Integrated System.

Figure 51.               Customer delivery and deployment workflow for node expansion

The following figure shows the high-level workflow for adding an SU node to an Azure Stack Hub SU. The node expansion workflow is run from the OpenManage Enterprise virtual machine.

Figure 52.               Node expansion workflow

Hardware components for node expansion

The following table lists the minimum hardware components that are required for the node expansion process.

Table 40.           Hardware components for node expansion

Node expansion prerequisites

Node expansion requires a working Dell EMC Integrated System to which new SU node or nodes are added. After they order new nodes, customers must ensure that the following prerequisites are met before installation:

• If new nodes are added to a customer rack, the rack (including the PDU) must be able to accommodate the new nodes.
• The existing Dell EMC nodes must be up-to-date with the most recent versions of the Microsoft Azure Stack Hub and Dell EMC patches and updates.
• The existing Dell EMC server must be in a healthy state.
• The existing Dell EMC server credentials and input parameters are required for the node expansion.

The Dell Technologies Support team can help customers with any queries.

Networking modification

Customers must modify their existing Dell EMC Integrated System switch-ports configuration (ToRs and BMC) when adding new SU nodes as part of the Dell EMC node expansion.

Deployment services

The following table lists the deployment services available to customers for a node expansion.

Table 41.           Deployment services