Dell Hybrid Management: Azure Policies for HCI Compliance and Remediation

Companies that take an “Azure hybrid first” strategy are making a wise and future-proof decision by consolidating the advantages of both worlds—public and private—into a single entity.

Sounds like the perfect plan, but a key consideration for these environments to work together seamlessly is true hybrid configuration consistency.

A major challenge in the past was having the same level of configuration rules concurrently in Azure and on-premises. This required different tools and a lot of costly manual interventions (subject to human error) that resulted, usually, in potential risks caused by configuration drift. 

But those days are over.

We are happy to introduce Dell HCI Configuration Profile (HCP) Policies for Azure, a revolutionary and crucial differentiator for Azure hybrid configuration compliance.

Figure 1: Dell Hybrid Management with Windows Admin Center (local) and Azure/Azure Arc (public)

So, what is it? How does it work? What value does it provide?

Dell HCP Policies for Azure is our latest development for Dell OpenManage Integration with Windows Admin Center (OMIMSWAC). With it, we can now integrate Dell HCP policy definitions into Azure Policy. Dell HCP is the specification that captures the best practices and recommended configurations for Azure Stack HCI and Windows-based HCI solutions from Dell to achieve better resiliency and performance with Dell HCI solutions.

The HCP Policies feature functions at the cluster level and is supported for clusters that are running Azure Stack HCI OS (21H2) and pre-enabled for Windows Server 2022 clusters.

IT admins can manage Azure Stack HCI environments through two different approaches:

• At-scale through the Azure portal using the Azure Arc portfolio of technologies
• Locally on-premises using Windows Admin Center

Figure 2: Dell HCP Policies for Azure - onboarding Dell HCI Configuration Profile

By using a single Dell HCP policy definition, both options provide a seamless and consistent management experience.

Running Check Compliance automatically compares the recommended rules packaged together in the Dell HCP policy definitions with the settings on the running integrated system. These rules include configurations that address the hardware, cluster symmetry, cluster operations, and security.

Figure 3: Dell HCP Policies for Azure - HCP policy compliance

Dell HCP Policy Summary provides the compliance status of four policy categories:

• Dell Infrastructure Lock Policy - Indicates enhanced security compliance to protect against unintentional changes to infrastructure
• Dell Hardware Configuration Policy - Indicates compliance with Dell recommended BIOS, iDRAC, firmware, and driver settings that improve cluster resiliency and performance
• Dell Hardware Symmetry Policy - Indicates compliance with integrated-system validated components on the support matrix and best practices recommended by Dell and Microsoft
• Dell OS Configuration Policy - Indicates compliance with Dell recommended operating system and cluster configurations

Figure 4: Dell HCP Policies for Azure - HCP Policy Summary

 

To re-align non-compliant policies with the best practices validated by Dell Engineering, our Dell HCP policy remediation integration with WAC (unique at the moment) helps to fix any non-compliant errors. Simply click “Fix Compliance.”

Figure 5: Dell HCP Policies for Azure - HCP policy remediation

Some fixes may require manual intervention; others can be corrected in a fully automated manner using the Cluster-Aware Updating framework.

Conclusion

The “Azure hybrid first” strategy is real today. You can use Dell HCP Policies for Azure, which provides a single-policy definition with Dell HCI Configuration Profile  and a consistent hybrid management experience, whether you use Dell OMIMSWAC for local management or Azure Portal for management at-scale.

With Dell HCP Policies for Azure, policy compliance and remediation are fully covered for Azure and Azure Stack HCI hybrid environments.

You can see Dell HCP Policies for Azure in action at the interactive Dell Demo Center.

Thanks for reading!

Author: Ignacio Borrero, Dell Senior Principal Engineer CI & HCI, Technical Marketing

Twitter: @virtualpeli

Quick! The word has just come down. There is a new initiative that requires a massively parallel processing (MPP) database, and you are in charge of implementing it. What are you going to do? Luckily, you know the answer. You also just discovered that the Dell PowerFlex Solutions team has you covered with a solutions guide for VMware Tanzu Greenplum.

What is in the solutions guide and how will it help with an MPP database? This blog provides the answer. We look at what Greenplum is and how to leverage Dell PowerFlex for both the storage and compute resources in Greenplum.

Infrastructure flexibility: PowerFlex

If you have read my other blogs or are familiar with PowerFlex, you know it has powerful transmorphic properties. For example, PowerFlex nodes sometimes function as both storage and compute, like hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). At other times, PowerFlex functions as a storage-only (SO) node or a compute-only (CO) node. Even more interesting, these node types can be mixed and matched in the same environment to meet the needs of the organization and the workloads that they run.    

This transmorphic property of PowerFlex is helpful in a Greenplum deployment, especially with the configuration described in the solutions guide. Because the deployment is built on open-source PostgreSQL, it is optimized for the needs of an MPP database, like Greenplum. PowerFlex can deliver the compute performance necessary to support massive data IO with its CO nodes. The PowerFlex infrastructure can also support workloads running on CO nodes or nodes that combine compute and storage (hybrid nodes). By leveraging the malleable nature of PowerFlex, no additional silos are needed in the data center, and it may even help remove existing ones.

The architecture used in the solutions guide consists of 12 CO nodes and 10 SO nodes. The CO nodes have VMware ESXi installed on them, with Greenplum instances deployed on top. There are 10 segments and one director deployed for the Greenplum environment. The 12th CO node is used for redundancy.

The storage tier uses the 10 SO nodes to deliver 12 volumes backed by SSDs. This configuration creates a high speed, highly redundant storage system that is needed for Greenplum. Also, two protection domains are used to provide both primary and mirror storage for the Greenplum instances. Greenplum mirrors the volumes between those protection domains, adding an additional level of protection to the environment, as shown in the following figure:

By using this fluid and composable architecture, the components can be scaled independently of one another, allowing for storage to be increased either independently or together with compute. Administrators can use this configuration to optimize usage and deliver appropriate resources as needed without creating silos in the environment.  

Testing and validation with Greenplum: we have you covered

The solutions guide not only describes how to build a Greenplum environment, it also addresses testing, which many administrators want to perform before they finish a build. The guide covers performing basic validations with FIO and gpcheckperf. In the simplest terms, these tools ensure that IO, memory, and network performance are acceptable. The FIO tests that were run for the guide showed that the HBA was fully saturated, maximizing both read and write operations. The gpcheckperf testing showed a performance of 14,283.62 MB/sec for write workloads.

Wouldn’t you feel better if a Greenplum environment was tested with a real-world dataset? That is, taking it beyond just the minimum, maximum, and average numbers? The great news is that the architecture was tested that way! Our Dell Digital team has developed an internal test suite running static benchmarked data. This test suite is used at Dell Technologies across new Greenplum environments as the gold standard for new deployments.

In this test design, all the datasets and queries are static. This scenario allows for a consistent measurement of the environment from one run to the next. It also provides a baseline of an environment that can be used over time to see how its performance has changed -- for example, if the environment sped up or slowed down following a software update.

Massive performance with real data

So how did the architecture fare? It did very well! When 182 parallel complex queries were run simultaneously to stress the system, it took just under 12 minutes for the test to run. In that time, the environment had a read bandwidth of 40 GB/s and a write bandwidth of 10 GB/s. These results are using actual production-based queries from the Dell Digital team workload. These results are close to saturating the network bandwidth for the environment, which indicates that there are no storage bottlenecks.

The design covered in this solution guide goes beyond simply verifying that the environment can handle the workload; it also shows how the configuration can maintain performance during ongoing operations.

Maintaining performance with snapshots

One of the key areas that we tested was the impact of snapshots on performance. Snapshots are a frequent operation in data centers and are used to create test copies of data as well as a source for backups. For this reason, consider the impact of snapshots on MPP databases when looking at an environment, not just how fast the database performs when it is first deployed.

In our testing, we used the native snapshot capabilities of PowerFlex to measure the impact that snapshots have on performance. Using PowerFlex snapshots provides significant flexibility in data protection and cloning operations that are commonly performed in data centers.

We found that when the first storage-consistent snapshot of the database volumes was taken, the test took 45 seconds longer to complete than initial tests. This result was because it was the first snapshot of the volumes. Follow-on snapshots during testing resulted in minimal impact to the environment. This minimal impact is significant for MPP databases in which performance is important. (Of course, performance can vary with each deployment.)  

We hope that these findings help administrators who are building a Greenplum environment feel more at ease. You not only have a solution guide to refer to as you architect the environment, you can be confident that it was built on best-in-class infrastructure and validated using common testing tools and real-world queries.

The bottom line

Now that you know the assignment is coming to build an MPP database using VMware Tanzu Greenplum -- are you up to the challenge?

If you are, be sure to read the solution guide. If you need additional guidance on building your Greenplum environment on PowerFlex, be sure to reach out to your Dell representative.  

Resources

• Dell PowerFlex
• VMware Tanzu Greenplum

Authors:

• Tony Foster – Dell Technologies, Twitter: @wonder_nerd
  LinkedIn
• Sue Mosovich – VMware