Ask the Experts: Supercharging your Azure Stack hybrid cloud with Dell Technologies | CONATE103
[Music] welcome everybody to the dell emc integrated system for microsoft azure stack hci wow that's a mouthful session here at ignite my name is peter thieling i manage the customer centric cloud and containers team here at dell technologies and with me today two of my very good friends that i'll obviously let introduce themselves hi my name is matt rauchus and i also am on the customer centric cloud containers team uh i'm a cloud strategist and i focus uh almost exclusively on microsoft azure and then the azure stack family of technologies with a special bent and a wonderful place in my heart for azure stack hci jeff thank you very much greetings everyone i'm jeff woolsey i'm a principal program manager at microsoft focused in the azure edge and cloud and platform team uh focus on azure stack hci hyper-v software-defined technologies but mode especially hybrid capability so it's a pleasure to be here excited to get right into uh azure stack hci you know uh one of the things that i hear about a lot from customers is hey we have really desired i.t infrastructure outcomes there's the things that we want to do within our data centers that we have to to support our business we want to make it as easy as possible we wanted to be as efficient as it can be and we want to transform the way that our it organization really approaches it but the other thing that we want to do is we want to really start to accept and uh understand and make use of the public cloud right and azure you know bringing these things together at the same time so that acceleration piece not just to be hybrid but to get there and take advantage of it as quickly as possible and we don't want to learn 18 000 different things in order to be able to do both right we want to have consistent infrastructure operations automation governance everything that goes along with it and we've been doing this for a while uh and the kind of thing that you don't see up here is well sure this slide starts at 2017 but if jeff and peter and i hop in the wayback machine to 2014 2013 really and we're coming out with the cloud platform system uh that's where this all started and then we move forward to 2016 and we've got storage spaces direct and then we uh productize it with ready nodes and then we move forward with server 2019 and now we have integrated control with openmanage integration for microsoft windows admin center and then we say we have an hci solution it's totally completely productized and packaged and then today what we find is we have this integrated system for azure stack hci which is azure it's an azure service delivered to your data center for the most uh easy to deploy manage maintain and integrate for that hybrid acceleration so i'm doing both the things right i'm i'm modernizing my it infrastructure and i'm making things azure hybrid and so what is it well this is azure stack hci and jeff you probably know more about this than just about anybody else out there well an azure stack is is is these things it's it's an enterprise class hyper conversion infrastructure so everything you're looking for software-defined compute software-defined storage software-defined networking that's built in here but the azure stack hci advantages we're bringing stuff from azure into azure stack hci we're bringing functionalities features services capabilities from the cloud on-premises so you're getting those capabilities and then azure hybrid by design the fact that azure stack hci out of the box all you have to do is register with azure and boom it just appears in the azure portal there's no complicated scripts there's no agents to install or download or any of that nonsense it's literally no i register with azure and boom it's there now i can see it now i can manage it at distributed scale and that's really where it comes into familiar management and operations because you can use your existing stuff if you're familiar with powershell guess what you're there if you're familiar with windows admin center if you're familiar with system center if you're familiar with the azure portal guess what this all just works and if you're familiar with all your third-party tools they're going to plug right in tool as well so when we look at the solution architecture not just the hardware ecosystem and believe me that's a very important piece of this in terms of delivering reliability delivering performance tested validated and certified and supported componentry at the base level and then layering on azure stack hci well that gives us you know a really good start to do the things that we're used to running virtual machines windows linux but i think the really exciting thing is that we've got azure arc here that cloud management that's in azure to bring azure into your data center so this isn't just how do i get from here to there it's what are the things that are makes sense to have on premises and i bring azure to me a great place to start with that is aks the azure kubernetes service because that enables not just container management right it also gives us a vehicle for the azure application services azure data services one of the most popular application services that there is is something called sql server and sql server and we have another session on this specifically but bringing azure sql into your data center via azure arc and having that on azure stack hci a fully managed sql instance wow that's pretty pretty awesome stuff and allows us to really begin to realize that hybridity did i just make that up i think hybridity that we're looking for well and what's what's great about this is you have what it shows you is number one you have the ability to run all of your existing stuff you want to run vms you want to run windows you want linux you're covered you're set you're done when you want to run the new stuff and the future stuff you've got containers because we have aks on hci and it also means now that we can deliver azure services like app services data services and even more and of course the big announcement we made yesterday about azure virtual desktop coming to hci we're delivering more services on premises so what we're doing is with dell and microsoft together we're building you these azure stack hci solutions that are really future proof because they run your existing stuff they're going to run the new stuff and of course this can be all cloud managed to azure arc that's yeah and and one of the things to add there right i mean when you look at the aks platform azure kubernetes service um a lot of our customers that we've talked to from an overall cloud perspective over the years i said well you know setting up kubernetes that's hard it's difficult um matt and i and and maybe even you jeff have tried to set this up in the past on different platforms right and it's not easy setting up azure kubernetes service on azure stack hdi literally guys 40 minutes of work and it's done and microsoft makes sure that it stays up to date oh you want to go from version 1.18 to 12.19 windows admin center will tell you there's a new version you hit update and your whole kubernetes environment is updated easy buttons that's what this is all about because we want to focus on the applications and not so much on let me maintain the infrastructure right no nobody likes being in the business of rotating the tires changing the oil replacing the wiper blades and all that stuff and and that's why we've done this the way that we've done it in our partnership with microsoft i said it before this is fully productized right this isn't a diy fly by the seat of your pants kind of hey man i hope this works this is tested validated certified supported we've taken all the guesswork out of what components and how to build it and how to put it together and deploy it as a cluster we've got a number of different offerings in here one you to you uh high core accounts low core accounts memories out you know all of that stuff focused on the performance that you require make no mistake i mean there's so much performance in here that uh lamborghini is like hey you guys are taking a page out of our book right but not just the performance but the stability right maybe something that uh certain car manufacturers can't talk about but we can because we've integrated the life cycle management absolutely you're gonna have to update these things as time goes on driver driver revisions security holes that need to be blocked all of that stuff but everything from the cluster creation to one click full stack cluster aware updated and not just the not just the bios drivers and firmware but all the microsoft bits for azure stack hdi too delivered together to give you a cloud-like experience from a maintenance footprint sure microsoft takes care of all of the care and feeding of the hardware and the uh and the hypervisor and the management layer and all of that stuff in azure and all you have to do here is press that one button and we do it for you so not that big a difference not that huge a leap in terms of how do we manage and maintain this and available everywhere so i'd like to talk a little bit about you know what are the use cases and workloads because hey uh we don't have any use cases and workloads for you you're the ones that have them based on the business that you run the services that you deliver the things that you manufacture the customers that you interact with and where when and why you do that and so sure the easy button here is hey we're gonna refresh your existing hyper-v infrastructure from 2008 2012 r2 or 2016 even 2019 to azure stack hci to get the greatest benefit and all of the hybrid use cases that we've talked about but without that right we're not going to get all of the other things that come with this jeff really just talked about the big announcement from yesterday and that's azure virtual desktop on azure stack hci so that i can have my virtual desktops deployed and managed in the same manner in the place that makes the most sense whether it's in azure or as close to the applications in my own environment where i need to consume the applications that we're running remote office branch office new ways to think about how i can deploy manage and maintain at the edge right without having to have a big it crew there to be able to handle it and not just doing it there but having the line of sight to it from azure i can see all of my locations from azure i can see what their status is i can see the workloads that are running there i can see how i can positively impact what our business is doing from one place and of course i talked about it previously uh high performance latency sense of sensitive applications like microsoft sql server the most widely deployed consumed understood relational database in the world and tightly integrated kubernetes right we are ready to take these applications that we have today maybe they're monolithic in nature and we want to modernize them and we can do it here because we can modernize them on exactly the same platform that our existing applications are running on today security jeff you you talk about this all the time this this slide just makes me happy um this is critical folks because security is uh uh is is just top of mind for everyone uh ransomware is just out of control we have customers telling us that ransomware keeps us up nice idc survey finds out a recent survey talked to idc found out that more than one third of organizations worldwide have experienced experience a ransomware attacker breach um just yesterday satya nadella pointed out that the cost of cyber crime annually is six trillion dollars and that number is going to just skyrocket by the time we get to 2025. what you're seeing here is work that we have done super closely um with at the heart with with the hardware layer to make sure that we have a fantastic solution to protect we're protecting the hardware root of trust we're defending against firmware level of attacks we're preventing access to unverified code and what you're seeing here is secured core server it's a whole new level of security we're bringing the server and the good news is this has already been tested it's already been proven because we've been shipping a whole bunch of aspects of this in secure core pc we know that secured core pcs are twice um twice as resistant to malware and we're bringing that to secured core server and you're seeing what that means in terms of tpm in terms of secured core in terms of the other features like bitlocker um cyber resilient architecture i mean we could literally spend you know an hour on this slide alone but the important thing to understand is with these latest azure stack dell solutions you're getting the absolute latest and greatest state-of-the-art so that when you modernize your on-prem guess what you're also getting better security in addition to better performance and better scale peter you want to take us through what sure um of course the hardware matters right and when you go even if you think about going back to that previous slide just in your head right i'm not asking you to go back to the previous slide but security it is not an afterthought here dell technologies what we do is we build the security as a fundamental building block of our platforms right so when we design a system uh from the ground up security is top of the list together with everything else that is in that system now what we've introduced uh this uh this past month is the latest generation of intel processors um uh incorporating that in our 750 platform now the fun part about this 750 platform is it has pci generation 4. that means i can now put 24 nvmes in here and we've recently tested one of these systems or actually multiple of these systems in the cluster for a let's say large financial institution that was looking for performance for their sql databases and we were easily able to squeeze over a million iops out of each node at yes sub millisecond latencies so it's not only super fast it's also the first one that's gone at the stoplight when it turns green right so it's the fun part about this technology that yes it has the the incredible software features that microsoft brings to the table but we know a thing or two about hardware and when we use these components and we can totally make it shine you're going to get the best of both worlds right and that's what this partnership between dell technologies and microsoft is all about and that we can bring to our customers so you can reap those benefits now apart from the 15th generation uh intel we also have amd options right the alternative and what is so fun about amd in this case the ax6515 is a single socket system great for remote office great for branch office right being able to deploy these in pairs two node clusters because that's all you need you don't need three two is enough and being able to say hey i'm going to create a factory in a box or i'm going to do retail in a box and deploying these everywhere you've got two servers that can have up to 64 cores you have 128 cores in 2u so think about all those edge locations that you can update with all that compute power you can deploy and then you can manage those all from the web all from the azure portal so nice so crazy and and you're going to be able to do awesome applications think of iot think of machinery think of um even ai and ml at the edge on a platform like this um where you just have so much horsepower in such a small footprint that you're actually going to be able to use these kinds of applications and drive your business forward right because that's what it's all about all right well it's not enough to just get these awesome systems out there to get them cabled labeled rack stacked give them power and get them deployed you got to manage it and i can't think of any better person on this call to talk about this piece than jeff thank you so much so you know i've said this a couple times but let me just let's just lay it out on the table when you deploy an azure stack hci solution you plug it in you turn it on guess what the first thing you do you go register it okay plug it in register to my azure account now when i go to azure there it is it's an azure resource right there in the portal no agents no scripts no nonsense it's just there now because it's there i can see it i can apply tags i can apply access role-based access control i can add things like monitoring i can secure it i can patch it i can do all of these things well now think of this in a larger environment imagine you're a retail store with say you know 50 stores around around the state or around the country or around the world instead of actually sending someone out there you can actually do this all from the azure portal in fact you can even use the app on your phone because it appears as an azure resource so now all of a sudden my phone can be used to see all my azure stack hcis i could see their health their performance their monitoring their logging all of that so not only that now let's talk about that's what i can deploy azure services i want to deploy functions kubernetes service machine learning ai all of these things at the edge and again manage them consistently and uniformly so guess what we now have a consistent way a single control plane with azure arc and if using azure stack hci it goes all the way down to the metal that's the benefit you get with us because you can go all the way down the stack hci where azure arc is built in and so all of this means you can deploy more servers more distributed and and solve one of the biggest challenges people have had i've spoke to customers about this for the last 20 years which is as they grow their distributed management becomes a huge problem well with azure arc and azure stack hci this is simply built in it's just right there it appears in the azure portal and you can start managing it easier than ever doing it at scale is this is the part that you're talking about right it's that hey certainly on premises uh i've got the dell emc openmanage integration with windows admin center uh and what that allows me to do is to bring together the dell bits and have line of sight to all the information about the systems themselves because windows admin center may not know hey are my fans spinning do both of my power supplies have power are they up uh and so i want to know if there's a condition like that that exists and that's what the openmanage integration gives you along with the ability to uh to do the bios driver and firmware in tandem with the azure stack hd ios updates but everything being able to have line of sight to that from arm so arm whether it's in azure or on top of azure stack hci control all my access and security from there i have line of sight to my environments and all the automation that i'm using how do i have this organized and how am i making sense of it within my organization and then how do i not only define but how do i enforce governance and compliance across my entire environment and to do it singularly not individually going to each site and saying now i now i want you to be like this and then going to another one and saying i expect you to be like this you know when things are out of compliance and you can remediate and then of course being able to deliver all the app and data services across your entire enterprise this is what i was talking about before with respect to hey these aren't independent of each other right these are all together uh and with windows admin center i'm delivering the same kind of experience on premises and then i'm able to consume the azure management services as and when appropriate at the scale that i am so on premises hey i want to have automated cluster creation with integrated deploy and update that's right there right that's available through windows admin center with our openmanage integration and the one-click full stack lifecycle management through the cluster aware updating right this is all really important stuff to how i deploy manage maintain my systems not just day one but how do i do it day x right 90 days a year out two years out so what does it look like well microsoft is providing us with windows admin center and then the dell openmanage integration takes place as an extension right within that providing all of the inventory the monitoring the update and then the ability to launch the integrated uh dell remote access controller so i can see what's happening directly on that system giving us the server cluster and the overall hci management experience that we're looking for and i talked about the automated cluster creation and this is great stuff because when i get my systems i want to know that they're all the same i want to make sure that all of the nodes have the same processors the same memory footprint they're running on the same platform the storage is deployed with identical drives across all the nodes in the cluster and i say check check check check i'm sorry i don't say that the deployment wizard says that it says hey these are the things that i found there's a newer version of this bios that's available and tested and validated for this system from when it ship between the time it shipped from the factory to the time you're deploying it let's update everything right now so that we start with a pristine environment and then automatically deploys it and then the cluster monitoring and management all of that real-time health status not just of the nodes but at the cluster uh uh and even the components i was talking about uh power supplies fans perhaps a drive or a number controller that's not connected right being able to see that have line of sight to it and remediate it as required and this is the really exciting thing for your for your ongoing operations is the full stack life cycle management with cluster aware updating you don't go to support.dell.com and find
this model and download the latest greatest you know windows server 2019 or azure stack hci os bios drivers and firmware all you do is go through the open manage integration connect to the repository for that that update catalog and you only have access to the tested validated and supported bias drivers and firmware so you're never getting anything that isn't part of the solution and it checks that out says hey these are the things that need to be updated do you want to do this now yes i do but i can also schedule that for when i want it to happen uh peter what do you what do you call this margarita time what's up yes yes i call that margarita time right it's roughly depending on which time zone you're in but that's like five o'clock friday afternoon um don't tell my boss that because you know he might actually require me to work a little bit longer but you know the interesting part is that what we've done is we've actually done a little bit of a study and that study shows that we can save 95 of attendance time i.e looking at the system waiting for the upgrades to be done right and what we're seeing here is you fire it off yes you need to do three four clicks to say okay it's now scheduled but the fun part is after that through cluster aware updates with no downtimes on your virtual machines or your containers the system the whole infrastructure will pretty much update itself now what's nice about that is you don't have to watch it you can actually set it up through things like let's say for example azure monitor and say hey azure monitor if this process is complete shoot me an email if this process goes out shoot me a text message let's assume that we don't look at emails over the weekend but we do look at text messages right so that's the kind of stuff where you can do hybrid management have azure monitor be in the cloud you don't need to go and create you know a complete management or monitoring infrastructure and it just saves you a ton of time and i need to manage a couple of these clusters for our customer solution centers nowadays as well that's not my day job i am the self-proclaimed worst systems administrator on the planet but the fact that it does that this does not take me a whole lot of time makes it possible now i want to be cognizant of the time that we have here and the thing is jeff and peter and i love this so much and we could go on and on and on uh but where where are we here we are just about at uh uh noon central time we're just we're just about a time just the one last thing i just want to say is again a huge thank you to dell for for having this session at ignite and the thing i also want to point out is think about what azure stack aci and this dell solution is giving you you can start as small as two nodes two nodes think about that for a second two nodes at the edge and have a high availability solution you can buy these and and and distribute these manage them all from azure think about the integration you've seen here from dell the fact that you don't have to go searching and hunting for drivers and firmware and bios because trust me i have done that a zillion times and it gets really old i'm sure we're all tired of that having it right here and basically going in admin center and we just go to the dell site and dell hands us the right package and guess what you get the latest stuff and it's not just the os it's the firmware it's the nix it's the bios it's everything and so you've got that that support and then of course you've got dell for support you've got your your end to end support there so it's a full solution so if you have questions and i see a lot of people in the chat um wanting some follow-up from dell i urge you to do that give peter give matt a call and and follow up here because there is so much you can do and again we're just opening the door even further with new things like azure virtual desktop at the edge great i'm going to stop showing the presentation do we have any super exciting stuff in the q a there's been a lot of questions and we've tried to answer as many as we could um of course you know if there's anybody that would like to talk to us after the fact matthew underscore rockets at dell.com and for me it's even easier it's just peter p-i-e-t-e-r dell.com wow peter at dell.com yeah at some point i'll teach people how you can actually do that but um best kept secret for me so if you need us if you would like to chat we have a team of at least 10 people um that would love to have conversations with any of you that are very well versed on the subject thank you so much for joining us today we hope that even though it was short that um this was useful um and we wish you a very happy show and thank you for uh for attending thanks everyone thank you thanks jeff thanks peter
2021-11-06 14:32
