Cisco UCS C240 M6 and M7 Solution for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI version 23H2

 

 

Published:  July 2024

Document Version History

About the Cisco Validated Design Program

The Cisco Validated Design (CVD) program consists of systems and solutions designed, tested, and documented to facilitate faster, more reliable, and more predictable customer deployments. For more information, go to: http://www.cisco.com/go/designzone.

Executive Summary

Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) include systems and solutions that are designed, tested, and documented to facilitate and improve customer deployments. These designs incorporate a wide range of technologies and products into a portfolio of solutions that have been developed to address the business needs of our customers. Cisco UCS Solution for Microsoft Azure HCI offers highly available and scalable software-defined hyperconverged solution that is enable by the purpose-built Azure Stack HCI 23H2 Operating System. The Azure Stack HCI 23H2 Operating System is an Azure hybrid cloud designed hyperconverged solution that is based on Microsoft Windows Server 2022 and includes Storage Spaces Direct, Windows Failover Clustering, and Hyper-V.

Azure Stack is a family of three solutions that include Azure Stack HCI, Azure Stack Hub, and Azure Stack Edge. Azure Stack HCI is focused on the following use cases:

●    Datacenter consolidation

●    Virtual desktop Infrastructure

●    Business critical infrastructure

●    Storage cost reduction

●    High availability and disaster recovery

●    Enterprise application virtualization

●    Azure Kubernetes Services

●    Remote branch office system

●    Arc enabled services

This document describes the architecture, topology, and deployment of Azure Stack HCI system, version 23H2 on Cisco UCS C240 M6SN, C240 M7SN and C220 M7N with Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches. Following the deployment guidance as specified in this document will result in a solution that adheres to both Cisco and Microsoft best practices.

Solution Overview

This chapter contains the following:

●    Introduction

●    Audience

●    Purpose of this Document

Introduction

Software defined data center solutions enable IT organizations to optimize resource efficiency and improve service delivery.  It combines compute virtualization, software defined storage, and virtualized networking that meets or exceeds high availability, performance, and security requirements of the most demanding deployments. The solution uses a shared-nothing architecture and takes advantage of the compute, storage, and network resources that are available within individual server. The servers are connected with external switching fabric that is provides reliable high throughput and low latency.

Audience

The audience of this document includes, but is not limited to, sales engineers, field consultants, professional services, IT managers, partner engineers, and customers who want to take advantage of an infrastructure that is built to deliver IT efficiency and enable IT innovation.

Purpose of this Document

This overview and step-by-step deployment document is intended to describe in detail the procedure used to deploy the Azure Stack HCI solution on a Cisco UCS C240 M6SN, C240 M7SN and C220 M7N Rack Server with the Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx/Lx NIC and connected to Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches. The procedure in this document should be used for deploying and evaluating this solution in a lab environment prior to deploying the solution in production. The deployment details described in this document need to be implemented as described unless stated otherwise.

This document will be periodically updated with new content. The contents will include procedures for deploying additional capabilities as well as qualified Cisco UCS firmware and drivers that must be used for deploying this solution.

Technology Overview

This chapter contains the following:

●    Cisco UCS C240 M6 Rack Server

●    Cisco UCS C240 M7 Rack Server

●    Cisco UCS C220 M7 Rack Server

●    NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx Ethernet SmartNIC

●    NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx Ethernet SmartNIC

●    Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC)

●    Cisco Intersight

●    AzureStack HCI

Cisco UCS C240 M6 Rack Server

The Cisco UCS C240 M6 Rack Server is a 2-socket, 2-Rack-Unit (2RU) rack server offering industry-leading performance and expandability. It supports a wide range of storage and I/O-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data and analytics to collaboration. Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers can be deployed as standalone servers or as part of a Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) managed environment to take advantage of Cisco’s standards-based unified computing innovations that help reduce customers’ Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increase their business agility.

In response to ever-increasing computing and data-intensive real-time workloads, the enterprise-class Cisco UCS C240 M6 Rack Server extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 2RU form factor. It incorporates the 3^rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, supporting up to 40 cores per socket and 33 percent more memory versus the previous generation.

The Cisco UCS C240 M6 Rack Server brings many new innovations to the Cisco UCS rack server portfolio. With the introduction of PCIe Gen 4.0 expansion slots for high-speed I/O, DDR4 memory bus, and expanded storage capabilities, the server delivers significant performance and efficiency gains that will improve your application performance. Its features including the following:

●    Supports third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, with up to 40 cores per socket

●    Up to 32 DDR4 DIMMs for improved performance including higher density DDR4 DIMMs (16 DIMMs per socket)

●    16x DDR4 DIMMs + 16x Intel Optane persistent memory modules for up to 12 TB of memory

●    Up to 8 PCIe Gen 4.0 expansion slots plus a modular LAN-on-motherboard (mLOM) slot

●    Support for Cisco UCS VIC 1400 Series adapters as well as third-party options

●    Up to 28 hot-swappable Small-Form-Factor (SFF) SAS/SATA/NVMe:

◦    28 SFF SAS/SATA (with up to 8x NVMe)

◦    26 NVMe in all NVMe SKU (SN)

◦    14 NVMe in all NVMe SKU (N)

◦    16 LFF drives with options 4 rear SAS/SATA/NVMe) disk drives, or 16 Large-Form-Factor (LFF) 3.5-inch drives plus 2 rear hot-swappable SFF drives

◦    Support for a 12-Gbps SAS modular RAID controller in a dedicated slot, leaving the remaining PCIe Gen 4.0 expansion slots available for other expansion cards

◦    Option for 26 NVMe drives at PCIe Gen4 x4 (2:1 oversubscribed)

●    M.2 boot options:

◦    Up to 960 GB with optional hardware RAID

●    Up to five GPUs supported

●    Modular LAN-on-motherboard (mLOM) slot that can be used to install a Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) without consuming a PCIe slot, supporting quad port 10/40 Gbps or dual port 40/100 Gbps network connectivity

●    Dual embedded Intel x550 10GBASE-T LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) ports

●    Modular M.2 SATA SSDs for boot

Table 1.     Item and Specification Details

Cisco UCS C240 M7 Rack Server

The Cisco UCS C240 M7 Rack Server is well-suited for a wide range of storage and I/O-intensive applications such as big data analytics, databases, collaboration, virtualization, consolidation, and high-performance computing in its two-socket, 2RU form factor.

The Cisco UCS C240 M7 Rack Server extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS Rack Server portfolio. It incorporates the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with 50 percent more cores per socket advanced features like Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA), and QuickAssist Technology (QAT), many applications will see significant performance improvements.

You can deploy the Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers as standalone servers or as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System managed by Cisco Intersight or Cisco UCS Manager to take advantage of Cisco standards-based unified computing innovations that can help reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increase your business agility.

The Cisco UCS C240 M7 Rack Server brings many new innovations to the Cisco UCS rack server portfolio. With the introduction of PCIe Gen 5.0 expansion slots for high-speed I/O, a DDR5 memory bus, and expanded storage capabilities, the server delivers significant performance and efficiency gains that will improve your application performance. Its features including the following:

●    Supports up to two 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPU, with up to 60 cores per socket

●    Up to 32 DDR5 DIMMs for up to 8 TB of capacity using 256 GB DIMMs (16 DIMMs per socket)

●    4800 MT/s DDR5 memory plus other speeds depending on the CPU installed

●     Up to 8 PCIe 4.0 slots or up to 4 PCIe 5.0 slots, plus a hybrid modular LAN on motherboard (mLOM) /OCP 3.0 slot

●     Support for Cisco UCS VIC 15000 Series adapters as well as third-party options

●    Up to 28 hot-swappable Small-Form-Factor (SFF) SAS/SATA or NVMe drives (with up to 8 direct-attach NVMe drives):

◦    New tri-mode RAID controller supports SAS4 plus NVMe hardware RAID

◦    Option for 28 NVMe drives at PCIe Gen4 x2 each

●     M.2 boot options:

◦    Up to two 960GB SATA M.2 drives with hardware RAID, or

◦    Up to two 960GB NVMe M.2 drives with NVMe hardware RAID

●    Up to five GPUs supported

●    Modular LOM / OCP 3.0:

◦    One dedicated PCIe Gen4x16 slot that can be used to add an mLOM or OCP 3.0 card for additional rear-panel connectivity

◦     mLOM slot that can be used to install a Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) without consuming a PCIe slot, supporting quad port 10/25/50 Gbps or dual port 40/100/200 Gbps network connectivity

◦    OCP 3.0 slot features full out-of-band management for select adapters

Table 2.     Item and Specification Details

Cisco UCS C220 M7 Rack Server

The Cisco UCS C220 M7 Rack Server is a versatile general-purpose infrastructure and application server. This high-density, 1RU, 2-socket rack server delivers industry-leading performance and efficiency for a wide range of workloads, including virtualization, collaboration, and bare-metal applications.

The Cisco UCS C220 M7 Rack Server extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS rack server portfolio. It incorporates the 4th and 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with 50 percent more cores per socket, advanced features such as Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA), and QuickAssist Technology (QAT). Many applications will see significant performance improvements.

You can deploy the Cisco UCS C-Series rack servers as standalone servers or as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System managed by Cisco Intersight or Cisco UCS Manager to take advantage of Cisco standards-based unified computing innovations that can help reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increase your business agility.

The Cisco UCS C220 M7 rack server brings many new innovations to the Cisco UCS rack server portfolio. With the introduction of PCIe Gen 5.0 for high-speed I/O, a DDR5 memory bus, and expanded storage capabilities, the server delivers significant performance and efficiency gains that will improve your application performance.

●    Supports up to two 4^th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs, with up to 60 cores per socket.

●    Up to 32 DDR5 DIMMs for up to 4 TB of capacity using 128 GB DIMMs (16 DIMMs per socket).

●    Up to 5600 MT/s DDR5 memory plus other speeds depending on the CPU installed.

●    Up to 3 PCIe 4.0 slots or up to 2 PCIe 5.0 slots, plus a modular LAN on motherboard (mLOM) slot.

●    Support for Cisco UCS VIC 15000 Series adapters as well as third-party options.

●    Up to 10 SAS/SATA or NVMe disk drives:

◦    New tri-mode RAID controller supports SAS4 RAID or NVMe hardware RAID with optional up to four direct-attach NVMe drives.

◦    Option for 10 direct-attach NVMe drives at PCIe Gen4x4 each.

●    M.2 boot options:

◦    Up to two 960GB SATA M.2 drives with hardware RAID.

Or

◦    Up to two 960GB NVMe M.2 drives with NVMe hardware RAID.

●    Up to three GPUs supported.

●    Hybrid modular LOM/OCP 3.0:

◦    One dedicated Gen 4.0 x16 slot that can be used to add an mLOM or OCP 3.0 card for additional rear-panel connectivity.

◦    mLOM allows for Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Cards (VICs) without consuming a PCIe slot, supporting quad port 10/25/50 Gbps or dual port 40/100/200 Gbps network connectivity.

◦    OCP 3.0 slot features full out-of-band management for select adapters.

Table 3.     Item and Specification Details

NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx Ethernet SmartNIC

NVIDIA ConnectX-6 Dx is a highly secure and advanced smart network interface card (SmartNIC) that accelerates mission-critical cloud and data center applications, including security, virtualization, SDN/NFV, big data, machine learning, and storage. ConnectX-6 Dx provides up to two ports of 100Gb/s or a single port of 200Gb/s Ethernet connectivity and is powered by 50Gb/s (PAM4) or 25/10 Gb/s (NRZ) SerDes technology.

ConnectX-6 Dx features virtual switch (vSwitch) and virtual router (vRouter) hardware accelerations delivering orders-of-magnitude higher performance than software-based solutions. ConnectX-6 Dx supports a choice of single-root I/O virtualization
(SR-IOV) and VirtIO in hardware, enabling customers to best address their application needs. By offloading cloud networking workloads, ConnectX-6 Dx frees up CPU cores for business applications while reducing total cost-of-ownership.

In an era where data privacy is key, ConnectX-6 Dx provides built-in inline encryption/decryption, stateful packet filtering, and other capabilities, bringing advanced security down to every node with unprecedented performance and scalability.

Built on the solid foundation of NVIDIA’s ConnectX line of SmartNICs, ConnectX-6 Dx offers best-in-class RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) capabilities, enabling scalable, resilient, and easy-to-deploy RoCE solutions. For data storage, ConnectX-6 Dx optimizes a suite of storage accelerations, bringing NVMe-oF target and initiator offloads.

Figure 1. NVDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx

NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx Ethernet SmartNIC

NVIDIA ConnectX-6 Lx Ethernet network interface cards (NIC) deliver high-performance network connectivity at 25GbE speeds coupled with advanced security and the best total cost of ownership for enterprise data centers. The NICs support up to two ports of 25GbE or a single port of 50GbE networking, along with PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 and Gen4 x8 host connectivity to meet the demands of modern workloads in the cloud, in the data center, and at the edge.

Figure 2. NVDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx

Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC)

The Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC) is a baseboard management controller that provides embedded server management for Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers and Cisco UCS S-Series Storage Servers. The Cisco IMC enables system management in the data center and across distributed branch-office locations. It supports multiple management interfaces, including a Web User Interface (Web UI), a Command-Line Interface (CLI), and an XML API that is consistent with the one used by Cisco UCS Manager. IMC also supports industry-standard management protocols, including Redfish, Simple Network Management Protocol Version 3 (SNMPv3), and Intelligent Platform Management Interface Version 2.0 (IPMIv2.0). The figure below shows a sample Cisco IMC screen.

Cisco Intersight

Cisco Intersight Overview

Cisco Intersight is Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. This capability empowers organizations to achieve significant savings in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and to deliver applications faster in support of new business initiatives. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers and Cisco HyperFlex, including Cisco HyperFlex Edge systems. Cisco HyperFlex Edge is optimized for remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments.

Endpoints supported by Cisco Intersight use model-based management to provision servers and associated storage and fabric automatically, regardless of form factor. Cisco Intersight works in conjunction with Cisco UCS Manager and the Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC). By simply associating a model-based configuration with a resource through server profiles, your IT staff can consistently align policy, server personality, and workloads. These policies can be created once and used by IT staff with minimal effort to deploy servers. The result is improved productivity and compliance and lower risk of failures due to inconsistent configuration.

Cisco Intersight will be integrated with data-center and hybrid-cloud platforms and services to securely deploy and manage infrastructure resources across data-center and edge environments. Additionally, Cisco provides integrations to third-party operations tools, starting with ServiceNow allowing you to use your existing solutions more effectively.

Cisco Intersight offers flexible deployment either as Software as a Service (SaaS) on Intersight.com or running on your premises with the Cisco Intersight virtual appliance. The virtual appliance provides users with the benefits of Cisco Intersight while allowing more flexibility for those with additional data locality and security requirements.

Cisco Intersight Features and Benefits

Table 4 lists the main features and benefits of Cisco Intersight.

Table 4.     Cisco Intersight Features and Benefits

Azure Stack HCI

Azure Stack HCI 23H2 is a hyper-converged Windows Server 2022 cluster that uses validated hardware to run virtualized workloads on-premises. Optionally, you can also connect to Azure services for cloud-based backup, site-recovery, and more. Azure Stack HCI solutions use Microsoft-validated hardware to ensure optimal performance and reliability, and include support for technologies such as NVMe drives, persistent memory, and remote-direct memory access (RDMA) networking.

Azure Stack HCI is a solution that combines several products:

●    Hardware from an OEM partner

●    Azure Stack HCI OS 23H2

●    Windows Admin Center

●    Azure services (optional)

Here is the link for What’s new in Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2:  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/whats-new?tabs=2405releases

Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft’s hyperconverged solution available from a wide range of hardware partners. Consider the following scenarios for a hyperconverged solution to help you determine if Azure Stack HCI is the solution that best suits your needs:

●    Refresh aging hardware. Replace older servers and storage infrastructure and run Windows and Linux virtual machines on-premises and at the edge with existing IT skills and tools.

●    Consolidate virtualized workloads. Consolidate legacy apps on an efficient, hyperconverged infrastructure. Tap into the same types of cloud efficiencies used to run hyper-scale datacenters such as Microsoft Azure.

●    Connect to Azure for hybrid cloud services. Streamline access to cloud management and security services in Azure, including offsite backup, site recovery, cloud-based monitoring, and more.

Hyperconverged Efficiencies

Azure Stack HCI solutions bring together highly virtualized compute, storage, and networking on industry-standard x86 servers and components. Combining resources in the same cluster makes it easier for you to deploy, manage, and scale. Manage with your choice of command-line automation or Windows Admin Center.

Achieve industry-leading virtual machine performance for your server applications with Hyper-V, the foundational hypervisor technology of the Microsoft cloud, and Storage Spaces Direct technology with built-in support for NVMe, persistent memory, and remote-direct memory access (RDMA) networking.

It helps keep apps and data secure with shielded virtual machines, network micro segmentation, and native encryption.

Hybrid Cloud Capabilities

You can take advantage of cloud and on-premises working together with a hyperconverged infrastructure platform in public cloud. Your team can start building cloud skills with built-in integration to Azure infrastructure management services:

●    Azure Site Recovery for high availability and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

●    Azure Monitor, a centralized hub to track what’s happening across your applications, network, and infrastructure – with advanced analytics powered by AI.

●    Cloud Witness, to use Azure as the lightweight tie breaker for cluster quorum.

●    Azure Backup for offsite data protection and to protect against ransomware.

●    Azure Update Management for update assessment and update deployments for Windows VMs running in Azure and on-premises.

●    Azure Network Adapter to connect resources on-premises with your VMs in Azure via a point-to-site VPN.

●    Sync your file server with the cloud, using Azure File Sync.

Management Tools

Azure Stack HCI uses the same virtualization and software-defined storage and networking software as Azure Stack Hub. However, with Azure Stack HCI you have full admin rights on the cluster and can manage any of its technologies directly:

●    Hyper-V

●    Storage Spaces Direct

●    Failover Clustering

To manage these technologies, you can use the following management tools:

●    PowerShell

●    Azure Portal

●    Windows Admin Center (optional)

●    System Center (optional)

●    Other management tools such as Server Manager, and MMC snap-ins (optional)

●    Non-Microsoft tools such as 5Nine Manager (optional)

If you choose to use System Center to deploy and manage your infrastructure, you'll use System Center Virtual Machine Management (VMM) and System Center Operations Manager. With VMM, you provision and manage the resources needed to create and deploy virtual machines and services to private clouds.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V is Microsoft's hardware virtualization product. It lets you create and run a software version of a computer, called a virtual machine. Each virtual machine acts like a complete computer, running an operating system and programs. When you need computing resources, virtual machines give you more flexibility, help save time and money, and are a more efficient way to use hardware than just running one operating system on physical hardware.

Hyper-V runs each virtual machine in its own isolated space, which means you can run more than one virtual machine on the same hardware at the same time. You might want to do this to avoid problems such as a crash affecting the other workloads, or to give different people, groups, or services access to different systems.

Storage Spaces Direct

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. The hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features such as caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovations such as RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

One cluster for compute and storage. The hyper-converged deployment option runs Hyper-V virtual machines directly on the servers providing the storage, storing their files on the local volumes. This eliminates the need to configure file server access and permissions and reduces hardware costs for small-to-medium business or remote office/branch office deployments.

Storage Spaces Direct is the evolution of Storage Spaces, first introduced in Windows Server 2012. It leverages many of the features you know today in Windows Server, such as Failover Clustering, the Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) file system, Server Message Block (SMB) 3, and of course Storage Spaces. It also introduces new technology, most notably the Software Storage Bus.

Figure 3. Overview of the Storage Spaces Direct Stack

Networking Hardware. Storage Spaces Direct uses SMB3, including SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel, over Ethernet to communicate between servers. Microsoft strongly recommends 10+ GbE with remote-direct memory access (RDMA).

Storage Hardware. From 1 to 16 servers with local-attached SATA, SAS, or NVMe drives. Each server must have at least 2 solid-state drives, and at least 4 additional drives. The SATA and SAS devices should be behind a host-bus adapter (HBA) and SAS expander. We strongly recommend the meticulously engineered and extensively validated platforms from our partners (coming soon).

Failover Clustering. The built-in clustering feature of Windows Server is used to connect the servers.

Software Storage Bus. The Software Storage Bus is new in Storage Spaces Direct. It spans the cluster and establishes a software-defined storage fabric whereby all the servers can see all of each other's local drives. You can think of it as replacing costly and restrictive Fibre Channel or Shared SAS cabling.

Storage Bus Layer Cache. The Software Storage Bus dynamically binds the fastest drives present (e.g. SSD) to slower drives (e.g. HDDs) to provide server-side read/write caching that accelerates IO and boosts throughput.

Storage Pool. The collection of drives that form the basis of Storage Spaces is called the storage pool. It is automatically created, and all eligible drives are automatically discovered and added to it.

Note:   We strongly recommend you use one pool per cluster, with the default settings. Read our Deep Dive into the Storage Pool to learn more.

Storage Spaces. Storage Spaces provides fault tolerance to virtual "disks" using mirroring, erasure coding, or both. You can think of it as distributed, software-defined RAID using the drives in the pool. In Storage Spaces Direct, these virtual disks typically have resiliency to two simultaneous drive or server failures (for example, 3-way mirroring, with each data copy in a different server) though chassis and rack fault tolerance is also available.

Resilient File System (ReFS). ReFS is the premier filesystem purpose-built for virtualization. It includes dramatic accelerations for .vhdx file operations such as creation, expansion, and checkpoint merging, and built-in checksums to detect and correct bit errors. It also introduces real-time tiers that rotate data between so-called "hot" and "cold" storage tiers in real-time based on usage.

Cluster Shared Volumes. The CSV file system unifies all the ReFS volumes into a single namespace accessible through any server, so that to each server, every volume looks and acts like it's mounted locally.

Failover Clustering

A failover cluster is a group of independent computers that work together to increase the availability and scalability of clustered roles (formerly called clustered applications and services). The clustered servers (called nodes) are connected by physical cables and by software. If one or more of the cluster nodes fail, other nodes begin to provide service (a process known as failover). In addition, the clustered roles are proactively monitored to verify that they are working properly. If they are not working, they are restarted or moved to another node.

Failover clusters also provide Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) functionality that provides a consistent, distributed namespace that clustered roles can use to access shared storage from all nodes. With the Failover Clustering feature, users experience a minimum of disruptions in service.

Failover Clustering has many practical applications, including:

●    Highly available or continuously available file share storage for applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and Hyper-V virtual machines

●    Highly available clustered roles that run on physical servers or on virtual machines that are installed on servers running Hyper-V

Solution Design

This chapter contains the following:

●    Architecture

●    Physical Topology

●    Azure Stack HCI Components

●    Logical Topology

Architecture

The Cisco solution for Azure Stack HCI architecture must be implemented as described in this document. Cisco provides a specific PID for ordering the configuration. The PID includes all of the required components that comprise the solution. The Azure Stack HCI cluster can be scaled from 1 to 16 servers. The architecture for the deployment of Azure Stack HCI solution consists of a storage switched configuration using two TOR switches with either fully converged or non-converged host network adapters.

The architecture has a data fabric and a management fabric. The servers connect to the data fabric using dual 100Gb connections. This data fabric is provided by the Cisco 9300 series switches which provide layer 2 connectivity and carries all the Azure Stack HCI network traffic (management, compute, and RDMA storage traffic). Server management is facilitated through an Out-of-band (OOB) management network that connects the server’s dedicated management port to an OOB management switch with 1GbE links. The servers Azure Stack HCI OS 23H2 provides a rich set of software defined services that are core to this solution.

Physical Topology

The data center is expected to have infrastructure services such as DNS and Active Directory. WDS (Windows Deployment Service) and DHCP are also recommended to expedite deployments. These services must be accessible through the ToR (Top of Rack) or EoR (End of Row) network switches that connect the Cisco UCS C240 M6 and M7 Servers that are part of the Cisco solution for Azure Stack HCI to the datacenter infrastructure.

Figure 4. Physical Topology

Azure Stack HCI Components

Cisco UCS C240 M6SN, C240 M7SN, or C220 M7N Servers

The Cisco UCS C240 M6SN or C240 M7SN, or C220 M7N server configuration consists of a one or two dual-port 100GbE NVDIA ConnectX-6 DX network interface cards, teamed with each port connecting to two different ToR switches and a single 1GbE dedicated management port which connects to an OOB management switch for communication with the Cisco Integrated Management Controller in each server.

The ToR switches, in this case Cisco Nexus 9300 Series Switches, carry both Azure Stack HCI cluster traffic and management network traffic to the Cisco UCS C240 M6SN or M7SN servers. The Azure Stack HCI cluster traffic flows throw 100GbE links to the NVIDIA ConnectX-6 DX network interface card/s in each server. Out-of-band management traffic is facilitated by a 1GbE connection to each of the Cisco UCS C240 M6SN, C240 M7SN, or C220 M7N severs.

ToR Switch

The ToR (Top of Rack) switches can be any Cisco Nexus switches that have confirmed support for the Azure Stack HCI requirements. The list of supported Cisco Nexus series switches and the NX-OS version can be viewed here. The ToR switch provides layer 2 and layer 3 connectivity to the Azure Stack HCI cluster nodes. The ToR switches should include a security focused configuration that is standardized within the datacenter network. Two ToR switches in Virtual Port Channel (VPC) configuration provide high availability and redundancy for the network traffics.

The Appendix of this document has sample configurations that can be implemented in the ToR switch. These sample configurations include vPC, SVI, HSRP, and DHCP Relay.

Out-of-Band Management Switch

It is expected that the datacenter has a secure OoB (Out-of-Band) management network that is used to managed network devices in the datacenter. Cisco UCS C240 M6SN and M7SN servers and the ToR switches are directly connected to the out-of-band management switches and a disjoint layer-2 configuration is used to keep the management network path separate from the data network path. The OoB network needs to have internet access in order for Cisco Intersight to be able to access the UCS C240 M6/M7 servers.

Logical Topology

The logical topology is comprised of the following:

●    Tenant/Compute Network

The Tenant network is a VLAN trunk that carries one or more VLANs that provide access to the tenant virtual machines. Those VLANs are configured on the ToR switch’s port in trunk mode. To connect VMs to these VLANs, the corresponding VLAN tags are defined on the virtual network adapter. Each tenant VLAN is expected to have an IP subnet assigned to it.

●    Management Network

The management network is a VLAN that carries network traffic to the parent partition. This network is used to access the host operating system. The connectivity to the management network is provided by the management (Mgmt) vNIC in the parent partition. Fault tolerance for the management vNIC is provided by the SET switch. A bandwidth limit can be assigned to the management, as necessary.

●    Storage Network

The storage network carries RoCEv2 RDMA network traffic that is used for Storage Spaces Direct, storage replication, and Live Migration network traffic. This network is also used for cluster management communication. The storage network has a Storage A and Storage B segment, each with its own IP subnet. This design keeps the east-west RDMA isolated to the ToR switches and avoids the need for the upstream switches to be configured for supporting RoCEv2 traffic.

DCB (Data Center Bridging) is required for RoCE. If DCB is used, PFC and ETS configuration is implemented properly across every network port, including network switches. RoCE-based Azure Stack HCI implementations require the configuration of three PFC traffic classes, including the default traffic class, across the fabric and all hosts.

Table 5 lists the QoS configuration used in this document. The QoS configuration should match on both – host-side networking and upstream physical network switches as well to which the nodes are connected.

Table 5.     QoS Configuration

Figure 5 illustrates the east-west RDMA traffic isolation.

Figure 5. East-West RDMA Traffic Isolation

●     SET Switch

This is a virtual switch with embedded teaming capabilities. The SET Switch provides teaming capabilities for network traffic that does not use SMB-Multichannel. SMB Direct (RDMA) traffic uses SMB-Multichannel for link aggregation and redundancy instead of the teaming feature in the SET switch.

MAC addresses for virtual NICs are randomly assigned to one on the physical NIC ports on the host.  This MAC address assignment can be moved from one physical NIC to another at any time by the SET switch. This behavior provides load balancing and fault tolerance. A consequence of this behavior is that some of the east-west network traffic that is not storage SMB Direct (RDMA) traffic will transverse the upstream router/switch. An example of this is when virtual machine A with a virtual NIC MAC address assigned to physical NIC A communicates with virtual machine B that has virtual NIC MAC assigned to physical NIC B. Figure 6 illustrates this behavior.

Figure 6. MAC Address Assignment

●    Guest Partition

The tenant virtual machines run in the guest partition on the Hyper-V host. Each virtual machine runs in isolation from others and does not have direct access to physical hardware in the host. Network connectivity is provided to the tenant virtual machine by connecting synthetic NIC in the virtual machine to the SET switch on the host.

●    Parent Partition

The parent partition is the host operating system that runs the virtualization management stack and has access to the physical server hardware. The parent partition has one management vNIC and two storage vNICs. An optional dedicated vNIC for backup operations can be added as needed.

Network ATC, a feature of Azure Stack HCI simplifies the deployment and network configuration management for Azure Stack HCI clusters. Network ATC provides an intent-based approach to host network deployment. By specifying one or more intents (management, compute, or storage) for a network adapter, you can automate the deployment of the intended configuration.

This section explains the logical topology for the below three network reference patterns:

●    Storage switched, fully converged

●    Storage switched, non-converged

●    Storage switchless

Storage switched, fully Converged

In this storage switched, fully converged network reference pattern, a single intent for compute, storage and management networks are deployed across all cluster nodes.

Consider this network reference pattern if:

●    For scalable Azure Stack HCI solutions, where the storage network adapters are connected to a network switch.

●    Bandwidth requirements for north-south traffic don’t require dedicated adapters.

●    Physical switch ports are scare and for cost reductions.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/plan/two-node-switched-converged

As illustrated in Figure 7, storage switched fully converged network reference pattern has the following logical network components:

Figure 7. Storage switched, fully converged logical topology

Storage switched, non-converged

In this non-converged network pattern, two intents – one intent for compute and management networks and a separate intent for storage network are deployed across all cluster nodes.

Consider this network topology:

●    For scalable Azure Stack HCI solutions, where dedicated storage network adapters are connected to a network switch.

●    For enhanced network performance

●    East-West storage traffic replication won’t interfere or compete with north-south traffic dedicated for management and compute

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/plan/two-node-switched-non-converged

As illustrated in Figure 8 for storage switched non-converged network reference pattern has the following logical network components:

Figure 8. Non-converged logical topology

Storage Switchless

In this storage switchless network pattern, two intents – one intent for compute and management networks and a separate intent for storage network are deployed across all cluster nodes.

Consider this network topology:

●    For enhanced network performance

●    East-West storage traffic replication won’t interfere or compete with north-south traffic dedicated for management and compute

●    Storage switchless is ideal only for smaller deployments (2 or 3-Node cluster) such as edge, ROBO, and so on.

For more information, go to: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/plan/two-node-switchless-two-switches

As illustrated in Figure 9 for storage switchless network reference pattern has the following logical network components:

Figure 9. Storage Switchless converged logical topology

Storage Network VLANs

The storage intent-based traffic in this pattern consists of two individual networks supporting RDMA traffic. Each interface is dedicated to a separate storage network, and both can use the same VLAN tag.

The storage network operates in different IP subnets. Each storage network uses the ATC predefined VLANs by default (711 and 712). However, these VLANs can be customized if necessary. If the default subnet defined by ATC is not usable, then manually assign all storage IP addresses in the cluster.

Management VLAN

All physical compute hosts require access to the management logical network. For IP address planning, each physical compute host must have at least one IP address assigned from the management logical network. A DHCP server can automatically assign IP addresses for the management network, or you can manually assign static IP addresses. When DHCP is the preferred IP assignment method, we recommend that you use DHCP reservations without expiration.

The management network supports the following VLAN configurations:

●    Native VLAN – not required to supply VLAN IDs. This is required for solution-based installations.

●    Tagged VLAN – supply VLAN IDs at the time of deployment.

The management network supports all traffic used for management of the cluster, including Remote Desktop, Windows Admin Center, and Active Directory.

Compute VLANs

Traditional VLANs are used to isolate your tenant workloads. Those VLANs are configured on the TOR switch’s port in trunk mode. When connecting new VMs to these VLANs, the corresponding VLAN tag is defined on the virtual network adapter.

Table 6 lists the VLANs used in this document where the default storage VLANs (711 and 712) used by Network ATC are overridden.

Table 6.     VLAN Names and IDs

Deployment Hardware and Software

This chapter contains the following:

●    Firmware and Drivers

●    Deployment Checklist

●    Bill of Materials

●    Customer Support Requirements

Firmware and Drivers

Firmware and drivers can be found on the Cisco download portal for Windows Server 2022 (Azure Stack HCI 23H2). These components will be periodically updated. Please sign up for notification at this download portal to receive notifications emails when updates are available.

The Cisco UCS C240 M6 or M7 standalone server platform for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI 23H2 firmware download portal can be accessed from the Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Standalone Server Software Download page. Also, it can be set up to notify you about the availability of the new firmware. Cisco highly recommends that you sign up for these notifications.

Table 7 lists the software components hosted on the Cisco download portal and are required for the firmware upgrade procedure.

Table 7.     Software Components

The following tables list the individual component version that are part of the respective firmware bundles and driver package:

The table below lists the component level firmware version in ucs-c240m6-huu-4.2.3e.iso file for M6 servers:

The table below lists the component level firmware version in ucs-c240m7-huu-4.3.2.240002.iso file for M7 servers:

 

Physical Infrastructure

Figure10 illustrates the physical topology of an Azure Stack HCI deployment on Cisco UCS C240 M6/M7 servers with Cisco Nexus 9300 series switches. The cabling information can be found in the Appendix of this document.

Figure 10.     Physical Infrastructure

Figure 11 illustrates the data ports and management ports on the back of each server with one dual-port network adapter in a storage switched fully converged network pattern.

●    In this network reference pattern, the ToR switches in redundant configuration handle northbound/southbound traffic.

●    Two ports teamed on the host side handle the management, compute, and RDMA storage traffic connected to the ToR switches. Each port in the network adapter on each server is connected to a different ToR switch. SMB multichannel capability provides path aggregation and fault tolerance.

In this example, Server 1 has these two 100Gb data ports connected to ports eth1/1 port on ToR A and B switches. The single dedicated out-of-band management port is connected to an OOB management switch. 

Figure 11.     Storage switched, fully converged network pattern with one dual-port network adapter

 

Figure 12 illustrates the data ports and management ports on the back of each server with two dual-port network adapters in a storage switched fully converged network pattern.

●    In this network reference pattern, the ToR switches in redundant configuration handle northbound/southbound traffic.

●    Four ports teamed on the host side handle the management, compute, and RDMA storage traffic connected to the ToR switches. Each port on the two network adapters on each server is connected to a different ToR switch. SMB multichannel capability provides path aggregation and fault tolerance.

In this example, Server 1 has two 100Gb data ports from the first network adapter connected to ports eth1/1 port on ToR A and B switches and, the other two 100Gb data ports from the second network adapter connected to ports eth1/2 port on ToR A and B switches. The single dedicated out-of-band management port is connected to an OOB management switch. 

Figure 12.     Storage switched, fully converged network pattern with two dual-port network adapters

Figure 13 illustrates the data ports and management ports on the back of each server with two dual-port network adapters in a storage switched, non-converged network pattern.

●    In this network reference pattern, the ToR switches in redundant configuration handle northbound/southbound traffic.

●    Two ports, one from each network adapter (‘SlotID 2 Port 1’ and ‘SlotID 5 Port 2’) teamed on the host side handle the management and compute traffic connected to the ToR switches. These two ports on each server are connected to a different ToR switch.

●    Two ports, one from each network adapter (‘SlotID 2 Port 2’ and ‘SlotID 5 Port 1’) in standalone configuration are used for RDMA storage traffic. These two ports on each server are connected to a different ToR switch. SMB multichannel capability provides path aggregation and fault tolerance.

In this example, Server 1 has two 100Gb data ports from the first network adapter connected to ports eth1/1 port on ToR A and B switches and, the other two 100Gb data ports from the second network adapter connected to ports eth1/2 port on ToR A and B switches. The single dedicated out-of-band management port is connected to an OOB management switch. 

Figure 13.     Storage switched, non-converged network pattern with two dual-port network adapters

Figure 14 illustrates the data ports and management ports on the back of each server with two dual-port network adapters in a storage switchless network pattern:

●    In this network reference pattern, the ToR switches in redundant configuration handle northbound/southbound traffic.

●    Two ports (‘SlotID 2 Port 1’ and ‘SlotID 2 Port 2’) teamed on the host side handle the management and compute traffic connected to the ToR switches. These two ports on each server are connected to a different ToR switch.

●    Two RDMA ports (‘SlotID 5 Port 1’ and ‘SlotID 5 Port 2’) in standalone configuration are used for East-West storage traffic. These two ports on each server are directly connected in a full-mesh configuration. SMB multichannel capability provides path aggregation and fault tolerance.

Figure 14.     Storage Switchless network pattern with two dual-port network adapters

Deployment Checklist

The following is the checklist for the deployment of a 4-node Azure Stack HCI cluster:

●    ToR switch must support the Azure Stack HCI requirements

●    ToR switch must implement L2 and L3 configuration for transporting northbound host and tenant traffic

●    Out-of-Band management switch must be provided for connecting the ToR switches and Cisco UCS C240 M6 and M7 servers

●    3 IP addresses are required on the Out-of-Band Management Network for the ToR Cisco Nexus switches

●    1 IP address must be provided for each host (server) on the Out-of-Band Management Network

●    VLANs

◦    1 Management

◦    2 Storage

◦    1 or more tenant

●    IP subnets and addresses for all endpoints for the above VLANs

●    Storage VLANs and Storage subnets need to be configured on the ToR switches

●    Host operating system must have access to Azure

●    Datacenter infrastructure that includes Active Directory Services, DNS, and NTP

●    Cluster Quorum Witness

◦    Can be Files Share or Cloud Witness

◦    Required for Cluster with fewer than 5 cluster nodes

●    Recommended for clusters with 3 or greater number of nodes

●    Deployment host must be provided with access to the Out-of-Band Managed network and host management network

◦    See the Remote Management Host configuration in the Appendix

●    Deployment host must be running Windows Server 2019 or Windows Server 2022 and be domain joined to the same domain as the Azure Stack HCI hosts

●    Account used to deploy Azure Stack HCI must have administrative rights on the Azure stack hosts and permissions to join the domain, add cluster securing principle to the domain, update the DNS A records for the computer joining the domain and Cluster Aware Updating services, and store Bitlocker keys in the domain

●    Azure Account for registering and deploying Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2 system

●    Download Azure Stack HCI OS 23H2 from the Azure portal

●    Download Cisco Drivers for Azure Stack HCI 23H2 deployment from Cisco download portal (link to be added)

●    Recommended Items

◦    Windows Deployment Service for PXE boot OS installation (Can be running on deployment host)

◦    DHCP server with scope for management subnet to support PXE booting. Scope is temporary and only needed during PXE boot installation phase. (Can be running on deployment host)

Bill of Materials

This solution must be purchased using the Cisco UCS product ID UCS-MAH-B00R00-M6. This product ID includes all of the required hardware to build the solution as well as the Cisco Solution Support for this solution. A sample BoM is documented in the Cisco UCS for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Datasheet at the following link: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/data-center-virtualization/microsoft-applications-on-cisco-ucs/microsoft-azure-stack-hci.html

Customer Support Requirements

The solution must adhere to Cisco Guidance for deploying Azure Stack HCI on Cisco UCS product ID UCS-MAH-B00R00.

Firmware and driver version must match the versions specified in this document. This document will be update periodically with more current firmware and driver versions. Customers are required to update their systems to the latest recommended firmware and driver version for this Azure Stack HCI solution.

Note:   The current firmware and drivers can be downloaded from the Cisco download portal for Azure Stack HCI. The link to the download portal is in the Firmware and Drivers section.

Note:   You must obtain an Azure Stack HCI support contract from Microsoft. The following is an example of this type of support contract:

●    Unified Support for Enterprise

●    Premier Support for Enterprise

For support option details, go to: Get support for Azure Stack HCI - Azure Stack HCI | Microsoft Docs

Solution Configuration

This chapter contains the following:

●    Requirements for Azure Stack HCI version 23H2

●    Configure Cisco Integrated Management Controller for Cisco UCS C240 Servers

●    Claim Cisco UCS C240 Standalone Servers in Cisco Intersight

●    Configure Cisco UCS C240 Standalone Servers using Cisco Intersight

●    Configure Policies to Create Server Profile

●    Prepare the Active Directory

●    Download the Software

●    Install the Operating System

●    Install Windows Drivers

●    Configure the Operating System using SConfig

●    Register Servers with Azure Arc and Assign Required Permissions for Deployment

●    Deploy Azure Stack HCI using the Azure Portal

●    Post Deployment Tasks

This chapter provides the instructions to deploy an Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2 system using Azure portal. You can also deploy an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template which is out of the scope of this document. To  deploy from an ARM template, go to:  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/deploy/deployment-azure-resource-manager-template.

Figure 15 shows the high-level deployment steps for the Azure Stack HCI version 23H2 system using the Azure portal.

Figure 15.     High-level deployment steps

Note:   Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2 is the latest GA version and doesn't support the upgrade from version 22H2. Begin the installation with a recent baseline build and then apply any update build. Strictly follow the version 23H2 deployment instructions. Don't mix steps from version 22H2 and version 23H2. For release information, go to:  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/release-information-23h2

Requirements for Azure Stack HCI version 23H2

Refer to the following links to complete the requirements to deploy Azure Stack HCI version 23H2:

●    Azure and System requirements: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/system-requirements-23h2

●    Physical network requirements: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/physical-network-requirements?tabs=overview%2C23H2reqs

●    Host network requirements: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/host-network-requirements

●    Firewall requirements: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/firewall-requirements

●    Network reference patterns: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/plan/network-patterns-overview

Note:   A contiguous block of at least six IP addresses are required on your management network to use for Azure Stack HCI and for services such as Azure Arc, omitting addresses already used by the servers.

Configure Cisco Integrated Management Controller for Cisco UCS C240 Servers

Procedure 1.     Configure Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC)

Step 1.        In the BIOS POST screen, press F8 to display the CIMC configuration screen.

Step 2.        A prompt displays to enter the default password and provide the user password (only first time). 

Step 3.        Select Dedicated NIC mode. 

Step 4.        Select Static or DHCP assignment. 

Step 5.        For Static mode, configure the IP address, Netmask and Gateway for the IPv4 setting of the CIMC. 

Step 6.        Select None for NIC redundancy.

Step 7.        Press F10 to save the configuration and exit the utility.

Step 8.        Open a web browser on a computer on the same network.

Step 9.        Enter the IMC IP address of the Cisco UCS C240 M6M7 Server: http://<<var_cimc_ip_address.

Step 10.     Enter the login credentials as updated in the IMC configuration.

Procedure 2.     Synchronize Cisco UCS C240 Servers to NTP

Note:   These steps provide the details for synchronizing the Cisco UCS environment to the NTP server.

Step 1.        Log back into Cisco IMC using a URL that starts with https://.

Step 2.        Select the Admin at the bottom of the left window and expand.

Step 3.        Click Networking > NTP Setting.

Step 4.        Select NTP Enabled check box to enable and enter the NTP server addresses.

Claim Cisco UCS C240 Standalone Servers in Cisco Intersight

Procedure 1.     Cisco Intersight Device Claim – Register Cisco IMC to Cisco Intersight

Step 1.        From the Cisco IMC, go to Admin > Device connector. 

Step 2.        Click Settings. 

Step 3.        From Settings, go to the General tab and enable the Device connector. For the Access Mode, select Allow control and enable Tunneled vKVM.

Note:   Tunneled vKVM is supported only for Cisco UCS C-Series servers with an Advantage or Premier license. Tunneled vKVM can be launched to complete OS installation from Cisco Intersight.

Step 4.        Verify reachability to Cisco Intersight is updated after configuring DNS, NTP and Proxy Settings. 

Step 5.        Copy the Device ID and Claim Code.

Step 6.        Create a Cisco Intersight account—go to https://intersight.com/ to create your Intersight account. You must have a valid Cisco ID to create a Cisco Intersight account. If you do not have a Cisco ID, create one by clicking Sign Up.

 

Step 7.        After logging in, from the Service Selector drop-down list, select System as shown below:

Step 8.        Go to ADMIN > Targets and click Claim a New Target.

The Select Target Type window displays.

Step 9.        In the filter column, select Compute / Fabric and select Cisco UCS Server (Standalone), and then click Start.

Step 10.     Enter the Device ID and Claim Code obtained from Cisco IMC.

Step 11.     Click Claim.

The Cisco UCS Server instance will be added to Intersight.

Step 12.     Go back to Cisco IMC to confirm that the device is claimed. Click Refresh to update the status.

 

Step 13.     Repeat steps 1 - 12 to claim other devices. After the targets are claimed, you can view the managed targets in the Targets table view.

Step 14.     Go to Settings > Admin > Licensing and register the license to assign Essential, Advanced, or Premier license for Cisco Intersight.

For more information about the different license tiers for Cisco Intersight, go to: Cisco Intersight License Management.

Configure Cisco UCS C240 Standalone Servers using Cisco Intersight

Procedure 1.     Upgrade Cisco IMC firmware for Cisco UCS C240 from Cisco Intersight

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, select Infrastructure Service.

Step 2.        Go to Operate > Servers, to launch the Servers Table view and select all the servers that require CIMC firmware upgrade.

Step 3.        Click the ellipses below the selected servers and click Upgrade Firmware.

Step 4.        On the Upgrade Firmware page, click Start.

Step 5.        On the General page, select all the Servers and click Next.

Step 6.        On the Version page, enable the Advanced Mode to exclude upgrade of drives and storage controllers:

◦    Exclude Drives—Check this box to exclude upgrade of drives.

◦    Exclude Storage Controllers—Check this box to exclude upgrade of storage controllers.

Note:   To exclude storage controller, ensure that the firmware version of Cisco IMC and the target upgrade firmware version is 4.1(3a) or later release.

Step 7.        On the Version page under Cisco Repository, select a firmware version bundle from the list below to upgrade the servers to and click Next.

Step 8.        On the Summary page, confirm the configuration and click Upgrade to initiate the upgrade.

For more information on upgrading Cisco UCS C-Series Standalone Servers Firmware, go to: Before you begin.

The upgrade workflow proceeds based on the selected reboot option.

Configure Policies to Create Server Profile

Note:   These steps can also be completed at the time of the Server Profile creation.

Procedure 1.     Create Virtual KVM Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, select Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > Virtual KVM and click Start.

Step 3.        On the Virtual KVM Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, enable Allow Tunneled vKVM, and other options as shown below and click Create.

Procedure 2.     Create Network Connectivity Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, select Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > Network Connectivity and click Start.

Step 3.        On the Network Connectivity Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, enter the preferred IPv4 DNS server addresses and configure other options as shown below and click Create.

Procedure 3.     Create SSH Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, select Infrastructure Services and navigate to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > SSH and click Start.

Step 3.        On the SSH Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, Enable SSH and click Create.

Procedure 4.     Create NTP Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, click Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > NTP and click Start.

Step 3.        On the NTP Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, Enable NTP, enter the NTP Server addresses and select a TimeZone. Click Create.

Procedure 5.     Create Local User Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, click Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > Local User and click Start.

Step 3.        On the Local User Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, Configure Password Properties and Add New User. Click Create.

Procedure 6.     Create Virtual Media Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, click Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > Virtual Media and click Start.

Step 3.        On the Virtual Media Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, Enable Virtual Media and other properties if required. Click Create.

Procedure 7.     Create Boot Order Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, click Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > Boot Order and click Start.

Step 3.        On the Boot Order Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, Enable Secure Boot and from the Add Boot Device drop-down list, select the boot devices.

Step 5.        Select Local Disk and Virtual Media and enter the details as shown in the below and click Create.

Procedure 8.     Create BIOS Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, click Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > BIOS and click Start.

Step 3.        On the BIOS Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, configure the tokens as shown in the following images, leaving the rest as defaults:

Procedure 9.     Create Storage Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, click Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Server > Storage and click Start.

Step 3.        On the Storage Create page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Policy Details page, Enable the M.2 RAID Configuration and select the MSTOR RAID-1 (MSTOR RAID) from the drop-down list as shown in the following figure:

Procedure 10.  Create Thermal Policy

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, click Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Policies and click Create Policy.

Step 2.        On the Create page for Policies, go to UCS Chassis > Thermal and click Start.

Step 3.        On the Thermal Create General page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Thermal Create Policy Details page, click the drop-down list under Fan Control Mode and select .

Procedure 11.  Create UCS Server Profile

This procedure explains how to create a Cisco UCS server profile, clone it, and deploy servers.

Alternatively, you can create a server profile template from which multiple server profiles can be derived and deployed on servers. For more information on server profile templates, go to: https://intersight.com/help/saas/resources/cisco_intersight_managed_mode_configuration#server_profile_templates

Step 1.        From the Service Selector drop-down list, click Infrastructure Services and go to Configure > Profiles and click Create UCS Server Profile.

Step 2.        On the Create UCS Server Profile page, click Start.

Step 3.        On the General page, enter the Organization, Name, Description and create a new tag or assign an existing tag. For Target Platform, select UCS Standalone under and click Next.

Step 4.        On the Server Assignment page, click Assign Now and select a server from the list shown below:

Step 5.        On the Compute Configuration page, hover the mouse cursor over right-side of the row next to BIOS and click Select Policy.

Step 6.        Select the policy created for BIOS in the previous section.

Step 7.        Select the respective policies created in the previous sections for Boot Order and Virtual Media as shown below and click Next.

Step 8.        Repeat steps 1 - 7 and complete the Management, Storage, and Network configuration and click Next.

Step 9.        On the Summary page, verify the configuration and click Deploy.

The deployment will take few minutes to complete, and the progress can be seen by clicking the Requests icon next to the Search field. The following figures show the status of the successfully deployed profile from Profile and Servers tab:

Step 10.     Clone the Profile created in the previous steps, by clicking the ellipsis and selecting Clone as shown below:

Step 11.     On the General page, click Assign Now and select the remaining unassigned servers and click Next.

Step 12.     On the Details page, edit the name under Clone Name Prefix and the number under the Start Index for Suffix as shown below and click Clone.

Step 13.     On the Profiles page, select all the newly created profiles with Not Deployed status and click the ellipses. Click Deploy.

Step 14.     On the Deploy pop-up page, click More Details to confirm, and click Deploy.

The following image shows the successfully deployed profiles on the assigned servers:

Prepare the Active Directory

Active Directory requirements for Azure Stack HCI include:

●    A dedicated Organization Unit (OU).

●    Group policy inheritance that is blocked for the applicable Group Policy Object (GPO).

●    A user account that has all rights to the OU in the Active Directory.

●    Machines must not be joined to Active Directory before deployment.

Follow the steps in this section to prepare the Active Directory environment before deploying the Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2.

Procedure 1.     Prepare the Active Directory

Step 1.        Run the following command to download and install the 2402 version module from PowerShell gallery:

Step 2.        Run the following PowerShell command to create the dedicated Organizational Unit (OU) and when prompted provide the username and password for the deployment:

Note:   The password for the AzureStackLCMUser must conform to the length and complexity requirements to avoid deployment failure. Use a password that is at least 12 characters long and must also contain three out of four requirements – a lowercase character, an uppercase character, a numeral, and a special character.

Step 3.        Verify that the OU is created. If using a Windows Server client, go to Server Manager > Tools > Active Directory Users and Computers.

An OU with the specified name is created and within that OU, you'll see the deployment user as shown below:

Note:   Servers must not be joined to Active Directory before deployment.

Download the Software

Procedure 1.     Download the Azure Stack HCI software from the Azure Portal

Step 1.        Sign in to the Azure portal with your Azure account credentials.

Step 2.        In the Azure portal search bar at the top, enter Azure Stack HCI and select Azure Stack HCI under the Services category.

After you select Azure Stack HCI, you're directed to the Azure Stack HCI Get started page, with the Get started tab selected by default.

Step 3.        From the Get started tab, under the Download software tile, select Download Azure Stack HCI.        

 

Step 4.        From the Download Azure Stack HCI page on the right, do the following:

◦    Select the Azure Stack HCI version 23H2.

◦    Select English to download the English version of the ISO.

◦    Select the license terms and privacy notice checkbox.

◦    Click Download Azure Stack HCI . This action begins the download. Use the downloaded ISO file to install the software on each server that you want to cluster.

Note:   The ISO that you download for Azure Stack HCI is OS version 25398.469. This ISO is then patched to the latest OS version during the installation process.

Install the Operating System

Procedure 1.     Launch Server KVM Instance to Install the Operating System

Launch KVM to each server after the service profile association is complete. Install the Azure Stack HCI OS 23H2 using PXE boot or a vMedia mapped installation ISO. Install the Azur Stack HCI OS 23H2 using PXE boot or a vMedia mapped installation ISO. This section explains the steps to install OS using vMedia method.

Note:   Installing the OS using PXE boot is out of the scope of this document.

Step 1.        From the Server tab in Cisco Intersight, select Servers. From the list of options select Launch vKVM.

Step 2.        From the left pane of KVM page, go to Virtual Media and select vKVM-Mapped DVD.

Step 3.        A Map Virtual Media – CD/DVD window displays, click Browse.

Step 4.        Select the downloaded Azure Stack HCI OS 23H2 and click Map Drive.

Step 5.        Verify the file is selected by clicking Virtual Media.

Step 6.        Go to Power and click Power Cycle System to restart the server.

Step 7.        During the POST, press F6 to launch Boot Menu.

Step 8.        In the Select boot device, select Cisco vKVM-Mapped vDVD and press Enter.

Step 9.        Wait for Press any key to boot from CD or DVD on the screen and press any key to launch the OS installation.

Step 10.     The installation wizard begins. Select the language to install or accept the default language settings, click Next and then on next page of the wizard, click Install now.

Step 11.     Review the license terms on the Applicable notices and license terms page and check the box for I accept the license terms and then click Next.

Step 12.     From the Type of Installation page, select Custom: Install the newer version of Azure Stack HCI only (advanced).

Step 13.     Select the drive on which the operating system is installed and then click Next.

The Installing Azure Stack HCI page displays to show status on the process.

Note:   The installation process restarts the operating system twice to complete the process and displays notices on starting services before opening an Administrator command prompt.

Step 14.     At the Administrator command prompt, select OK to change the user's password before signing in to the operating system, then press Enter.

Step 15.     At the Enter new credential for Administrator prompt, enter a new password.

Step 16.     From the Your password has been changed confirmation prompt, press Enter.

Note:   Set the local administrator credentials to be identical across all servers.

Note:   Make sure that the local administrator password follows Azure password length and complexity requirements to avoid deployment failure. Use a password that is at least 12 characters long and must also contain three out of four requirements – a lowercase character, an uppercase character, a numeral, and a special character.

Install Windows Drivers

Procedure 1.     Download Windows Drivers

Post OS installation, download the relevant Windows driver image for the Cisco UCS Standalone Server software (4.2.3x for M6 servers or 4.3.x for M7 servers) from the download portal Software Download - Cisco Systems and install the drivers for Chipset, Storage, and Network.

Step 1.        Mount the downloaded iso image for Windows drivers only.

Step 2.        Copy the following files from the mounted drive to a separate folder. Copy this folder with drivers to all the Cisco UCS C240 M6/M7 servers:

.\ChipSet\Intel\ChipsetSoftware\x.x.x\SetupChipset.exe

.\Network\Mellanox\ConnectX4-5-6\W2K22\MLNX_WinOF2-3_0_50000_All_x64.exe

.\Storage\Intel\C600\W2K22\*.*

Procedure 2.     Intel Chipset Installation

Step 1.        Run the following command on all the nodes to install the chipset drivers. The system will restart automatically in couple of minutes after the chipset installation in unattended silent mode. Monitor and wait for system to restart.

Procedure 3.     NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-6 DX/LX Driver Installation

Step 1.        Run the following command on all the nodes to install the drivers for NVIDIA (Mellanox) in unattended mode:

Unattended install

Or Unattended install with Logs

Step 2.        Alternatively, run the following command to extract only the driver files and use pnputil command to install the drivers:

Procedure 4.     Storage Drivers Install

Step 1.        Run the following command to install the Intel storage (MegaSR) drivers:

Note:   All drivers can be installed using PNPUtil.exe.

The following PNPUtile.exe example can be used to install drivers:

PNPUtil.exe documentation can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/pnputil

Configure the Operating System using SConfig

Procedure 1.     Verify the Operating System Version

Step 1.        Open a KVM session to each host and perform the following configuration to enable remote access to each host. After logging in, start PowerShell by selecting option 15 (Exit to command line (PowerShell)) in the SConfig screen. 

Step 2.        Run the following command to verify the OS version:

Procedure 2.     Verify Available NICs Seen by the Operating System

Step 1.        Run the command on each server:

Procedure 3.     Disable DHCP on Port 2 of the NIC and Verify the Setting

Step 1.        Run the following commands on each server:

Procedure 4.     Configure Static NIC IP Address for Management NIC’s

Note:   Replace the IP address with the address specific to your environment.

Note:   The VLAN for this subnet must be set to Native because VLAN tagging is not configured for this physical interface.

Step 1.        Run the following command on each server with unique IP address:

Note:   Each host must have a unique host name and IP address for your environment. The following is a table of host names and IP addresses used in this deployment:

Procedure 5.     Configure DNS Client Server IP Address

Note:   Replace the DNS Server IP address with the address specific to your environment.

Step 1.        Run the following commands on each server:

Procedure 6.     Configure Proxy settings for Azure Stack HCI

If your network uses a proxy server for internet access, refer to this article about how to configure proxy settings for Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2

For information about firewall requirements for outbound endpoints and internal rules and ports for Azure Stack HCI, see Firewall requirements for Azure Stack HCI.

Procedure 7.     Configure Time Zone

Time zone must have the same setting on all cluster nodes. 

Step 1.        Run the following command on each server to configure time zone:

Note:   The time zone is specific to the region. The following command lists available time zones.

Procedure 8.     Configure valid Time Server

Step 1.        Run the following command on each server to validate that it is not using the local CMOS clock as a time source:

Step 2.        To configure a valid time source, run the following command on each server:

Step 3.        Confirm that the time is successfully synchronizing using the new time server:

Procedure 9.     Enable Remote Desktop Access on the Host Servers

Step 1.        Run the following command on each server to enable RDP on all hosts:

Procedure 10.  Clean Inventory Storage Drives that will be used by Storage Spaces Direct

Before you enable Storage Spaces Direct, ensure your permanent drives are empty. Run the following script to remove any old partitions and other data from the non-OS drives on all servers.

Step 1.        Run the following on each server:

Procedure 11.  Rename Computer Name

Step 1.        Run the following command:

The server restarts after renaming the computer.

Procedure 12.  Install Required Windows Roles

Step 1.        Run the following command on each server to install the Hyper-V role:

The server restarts after installing the role.

Register Servers with Azure Arc and Assign Required Permissions for Deployment

This section describes how to register your Azure Stack HCI servers and then set up the required permissions to deploy an Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2 cluster.

Procedure 13.  Register servers with Azure Arc

Run these steps on each server that you intend to cluster.

Step 1.        Install the Arc registration script from PSGallery.

Step 2.        Run the following to set the parameters. The script takes in the following parameters:

Step 3.        Run the following command to connect to your Azure account and set the subscription. You'll need to open browser on the client that you're using to connect to the server and open this page: https://microsoft.com/devicelogin and enter the provided code in the Azure CLI output to authenticate.

Step 4.        Get the access token and account ID for the registration:

Step 5.        Run the Arc registration script which takes a few minutes to complete:

Note:   If you're accessing the internet using a proxy server, you need to pass the -proxy parameter and provide the proxy server as http://<Proxy server FQDN or IP address>:Port when running the script.

Step 6.        After the script completes successfully on all the servers, verify that your servers are registered with Arc and the mandatory Azure Stack HCI extensions are installed on your servers.

a.     Go to the Azure portal and then go to the resource group associated with the registration. The servers appear within the specified resource group as Machine - Azure Arc type resources.

b.     From the resource group, select the registered server. Go to Extensions. The mandatory extensions show up in the right pane.

Note:   If you encounter this issue – “Get-AzAccessToken failed · Issue #24963 · Azure/azure-powershell · GitHub,” follow this workaround:

Step 7.        Once the script completes, enter the following command:

Procedure 14.  Assign required permissions for deployment

Step 1.        In the Azure portal, go to the subscription where the servers are registered. In the left pane, select Access control (IAM). In the right pane, click + Add and from the drop-down list, select Add role assignment.

Step 2.        Go through the tabs and assign the following role permissions to the user who deploys the cluster:

●    Azure Stack HCI Administrator

●    Reader

 

Step 3.        In the Azure portal, go to the resource group where the servers are registered in your subscription. In the left pane, select Access control (IAM). In the right pane, select + Add and from the drop-down list, select Add role assignment.

Step 4.        Go through the tabs and assign the following role permissions to the user who deploys the cluster:

●    Key Vault Data Access Administrator

●    Key Vault Administrator

●    Key Vault Secrets Officer

●    Key Vault Contributor

●    Storage Account Contributor

Step 5.        In the right pane, click Role assignments and verify that the deployment user has all the configured roles.

Step 6.        In the Azure portal, search for and select Microsoft Entra roles and administrators.

Step 7.        Assign the Cloud Application Administrator role permission at the Microsoft Entra tenant level.

Note:   The Cloud Application Administrator permission is temporarily needed to create the service principal. After deployment, this permission can be removed.

Deploy Azure Stack HCI using the Azure Portal

Follow the steps in this section to deploy an Azure Stack HCI version 23H2 system using the Azure portal.

Procedure 1.     Basics setting

Step 1.        In the Azure portal, search for Azure Arc. Select Azure Arc and go to Infrastructure and select Azure Stack HCI. From the Get started tab, select Deploy cluster.

Step 2.        Select the Subscription and Resource group in which to store this system's resources.

Step 3.        Enter the Cluster name used for this Azure Stack HCI system when Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) was prepared for this deployment.

Step 4.        Select the Region.

Step 5.        Create an new Key vault.

Step 6.        Select the servers that make up this Azure Stack HCI system and click on Validate Selected Servers.

 

Step 7.        After successful validation (a green checkbox appears), click Next: Configuration.

The validation process checks that each server is running the same exact version of the OS, has the correct Azure extensions, and has matching (symmetrical) network adapters.

Procedure 2.     Configuration settings

For this procedure, specify the deployment settings by choosing to create a new configuration or to load deployment settings from a template.

Step 1.        For the source of the deployment settings, select New configuration and click Next: Networking.

Procedure 3.     Networking settings

For this procedure, specify the network settings based on the network reference pattern (as described in the earlier section) that you are planning to deploy.

Step 1.        Select the Network switch for storage traffic.

●    No switch for storage - For two-node clusters with storage network adapters that connect the two servers directly without going through a switch. Storage Switchless network reference pattern do not use network switch for storage.

●    Network switch for storage traffic - For clusters with storage network adapters connected to a network switch. This also applies to clusters that use converged network adapters that carry all traffic types including storage. Both converged and non-converged network reference pattern use the Network switch for storage traffic.

The following steps focuses on deploying an Azure Stack HCI system using the converged network reference pattern where all the three types (Management, Compute and Storage) of traffic pass through them to a pair of upstream network switches.

Step 2.        In the Group network traffic types by intent, select Group all traffic.

Step 3.        In the Provide intent details:

●    Enter an Intent name.

●    From the drop-down list for Network Adapter 1, select one unused network adapter and enter the VLAN ID set on the network switches used for each storage network.

●    For redundancy, click + Select another adapter for this traffic and repeat the above step for Network Adapter 2.

Step 4.        Select Customize network settings and provide the following information:

●    Storage traffic priority: Select 4 from the drop-down list.

●    Cluster traffic priority: Select 5 from the drop-down list.

●    Storage traffic bandwidth reservation: Default 50.

●    Adapter properties: Select 9014 for Jumbo frame size (in bytes) and RoCEv2 for RDMA protocol from the drop-down list.

Note:   Cisco recommends customizing network settings for an intent. The QoS configuration on the host side should match the QoS configuration on the network switches.

Step 5.        Click Save to save the customized network values.

Step 6.        From the Allocate IP addresses to the system and services, enter the required details. The block of 6 static IP addresses must be from your management network subnet. IP addresses already used by the servers should be excluded from this range.

Step 7.        Click Next: Management.

Procedure 4.     Management settings

Step 1.        In the Specify a custom location name, provide a name. This helps users identify this system when creating resources such as VMs on it.

Step 2.        In the Specify cluster witness settings, select an existing Storage account or create a new Storage account to store the cluster witness file.

Step 3.        Enter the FQDN name of the Active Directory Domain whose AD DS was prepared for deployment as prerequisite.

Step 4.        Enter the OU created for this deployment.

Step 5.        Enter the Deployment account credentials.

This domain user account was created when the domain was prepared for deployment.

Step 6.        Enter the Local administrator credentials for the servers.

Note:   Make sure the credentials must be identical on all servers in the system and meet the complexity requirements.

Step 7.        Click Next: Security.

Procedure 5.     Security settings

Step 1.        Select the security level for your system's infrastructure:

●    Recommended security settings – All security settings are enabled. This sets the highest security settings.

●    Customized security settings – Allows you to turn on/off the security settings.

Step 2.        Click Next: Advanced.

Procedure 6.     Advanced and Tags settings

Optionally, follow these steps to change advanced settings and apply tags to the system.

Step 1.        Select whether to create to workload and infrastructure volumes now or create just the infrastructure volume and workload volumes later. Use existing data drives is for the single servers (1-node cluster) only.

Note:   Don't delete the infrastructure volumes created during deployment.

Step 2.        Click Next: Tags.

Step 3.        Optionally, add a tag to the resource and click Next: Validation.

Procedure 7.     Validate and deploy the system

Step 1.        After successfully verifying the cluster resource object and its components are created, click Start validation.

Step 2.        Monitor the validation progress as they may take some time to complete depending on the number of servers in the system.

Step 3.        Once the validation is completed successfully, review the results and click Next: Review + create.

Step 4.        Resolve any validation errors before moving to the next step.

Step 5.        Review the deployment settings and click Review + create to deploy the system.

Step 6.        The deployment page will appear. Monitor the deployment progress. This may take few hours depending on the size of the system.

A sample of a successful deployment is shown below:

Step 7.        If a deployment fails, rerun the deployment by going to Deployments and select Rerun deployment.

Procedure 8.     Verify post deployment

Step 1.        Verify a successful deployment by clicking Go to resource.

Step 2.        Verify the resources created after a successful deployment. The following image shows the resources created for a 2-node Azure Stack HCI cluster:

Step 3.        Verify the status of storage paths. One workload volume is created per server in the system.

Step 4.        Verify the status of Azure Arc for the nodes.

Step 5.        On a cluster node, run the following command to verify the netintent status and make sure the ConfigurationStatus and ProvisioningStatus are successful and completed:

Post Deployment Tasks

Procedure 1.     Post deployment tasks

Follow the steps in this procedure to enable Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) as it is disabled for security reasons after the deployment is completed.

Step 1.        On your management PC, run PowerShell as an administrator.

Step 2.        Run the following command to connect to your Azure Stack HCI node/server via a remote PowerShell session:

Step 3.        Run the following command to enable RDP:

Procedure 2.     Lock Arc Resource Bridge

Follow this procedure to configure the lock on Arc Resource Bridge to prevent it from accidental deletion.

Step 1.        In the Azure portal, go to the resource group where Azure Stack HCI system is deployed.

Step 2.        From the Overview > Resources tab, locate and select the Arc Resource Bridge resource to go to the resource.

Step 3.        Select Locks and click Add.

Step 4.        Enter the lock details and then click OK.

Appendix

This appendix contains the following:

●    Reference Links

●    Cabling Information

●    Remote Management Host

●    Add Drivers and Windows Updates to a Windows Installation Image

●    Create an ISO Image with Update .WIM Files

●    Install and Configure DHCP Server Feature

●    ToR Switch Configuration

Reference Links

Azure Stack HCI documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/

Azure Stack HCI, version 23H2 deployment: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/deploy/deployment-introduction

Cluster-Aware Updating: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/cluster-aware-updating

Active Memory Dump: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/failover-clustering/windows-server-2016-failover-cluster-troubleshooting/ba-p/372008

Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Connectivity to Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches in Cisco NX-OS and Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) Mode

Cabling Information

In this section, detailed cabling connectivity information is described for all topologies. For specific details on supported cable information, refer to the following links:

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/nvidia-mellanox-connectx-6-ethernet-smartnic-data-sheet.pdf

https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/?si=Mellanox

Table 8.     Cabling Map for 4-node (with 2 NICs) fully converged Azure Stack HCI cluster

Table 9.     Cabling Map for 4-node (with 4 NICs) fully converged and non-converged Azure Stack HCI cluster

Table 10.   Cabling Map for 2-node (with 4 NICs) storage switchless topology for Azure Stack HCI cluster

For supported cables and modules, refer to the following links:

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/nvidia-mellanox-connectx-6-ethernet-smartnic-data-sheet.pdf

https://tmgmatrix.cisco.com/

Remote Management Host

The required Widows features are as follows:

●    Clustering

●    Hyper-V Management

●    Group Policy Management

●    Bitlocker Recovery Password Viewer

●    Active Directory Management Tools

Add Drivers and Windows Updates to a Windows Installation Image

A Windows ISO image includes boot.wim and install.wim files that are used for installation. The following are the PowerShell cmdlets to inject drivers into these .wim files.

●    Get-WindowsImage:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/dism/get-windowsimage?view=win10-ps

●    Mount-WindowsImage:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/dism/mount-windowsimage?view=win10-ps

●    Add-WindowsDriver:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/dism/add-windowsdriver?view=win10-ps

●    Dismount-WindowsImage:  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/dism/dismount-windowsimage?view=win10-ps

Procedure 1.     Prepare Driver Injection Computer

Step 1.        Copy contents of Windows Server 2019 ISO distribution ISO, including boot.wim and install.wim, to a computer disk that will be used to inject the drivers.

Example:

Destination path = C:\temp\Source-ISO

Step 2.        Copy required drivers into a subdirectory on the server. Each driver should have its own subdirectory. Each driver should include a .sys, .inf, and a .cat file at minimum. Drivers cannot be in a zip file or exe file. Chipset drivers need to be extracted prior to injection.

Example:

Destination path: C:\temp\drivers

Step 3.        Create a subdirectory for mounting the target image.

Example:

Procedure 2.     Inject Drivers into boot.wim Images

Step 1.        Identify available images in the boot file (there should be two).

Example:

Step 2.        Identify the index for the index number of the image that needs drivers.

Step 3.        Mount the target image.

Example:

Step 4.        Add drivers to the mounted image. You only need to add the drivers for devices that need to be accessed during the preinstallation phase and are not in the Windows distribution. This may be the boot device drivers and network drivers.

Example:

Step 5.        Save and dismount the image.

Example:

Step 6.        Repeat steps 1 – 5 for the other images in the boot.wim file if necessary.

Procedure 3.     Inject Drivers into install.wim images

Step 1.        Identify available images in the boot file (there should be two).

Example:

Step 2.        Identify the index for the index number of the image that needs drivers.

Step 3.        Mount the target image.

Example:

Step 4.        Add drivers to the mounted image. You only need to add all required drivers.

Example:

Step 5.        Save and dismount the image.

Example:

Step 6.        Repeat steps 1 – 5 for the other images in the install.wim file if necessary.

The updated install.wim and boot.wim can be copied to and PXE server that is used for deployment. WDS (Windows Deployment Service) is an example of a PXE server that can be used to deploy the Windows operating system.

Create an ISO Image with Update .WIM Files

If a PXE server is unavailable for executing deployments, the operating system can be installed using and Windows installation ISO image. A new ISO image must be created with the updated .WIM installation files.

OSCDIMG.exe is a command line tool that can be used to create a new ISO installation image using the updated files. This tool is part of if the Automation Deployment Kit (ADK). 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/get-started/adk-install

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/oscdimg-command-line-options

Example:

Install and Configure DHCP Server Feature

Procedure 1.     Install and Configure the DHCP Server feature

Step 1.        Run the following:

ToR Switch Configuration Example

This section describes the ToR (Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2) switches example configuration used for the deployment of this Azure Stack HCI solution. The Cisco Nexus switch configuration explains the basic L2 and L3 functionality and QoS configuration for the Azure Stack HCI solution environment used in the validation environment. The gateways required for this solution are hosted by the pair of Cisco Nexus switches, but the primary routing is passed onto an existing router that is upstream of the converged infrastructure. This upstream router will need to be aware of any networks created on the Cisco Nexus switches, but configuration of an upstream router is beyond the scope of this deployment guide.

Check NXOS Version

For Azure Stack HCI solution, the supported NXOS version is 10.3(2)F or later and the supported Cisco Nexus switches are listed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/physical-network-requirements?tabs=Cisco%2C23H2reqs

Enable Features

Some of the key NX-OS features implemented for this solution are:

●    Feature interface-vlan – Allows for VLAN IP interfaces to be configured within the switch as gateways.

●    Feature HSRP – Allows for Hot Standby Routing Protocol configuration for high availability.

●    Feature LACP – Allows for the utilization of Link Aggregation Control Protocol (802.3ad) by the port channels configured on the switch.

●    Feature vPC – Virtual Port-Channel (vPC) presents the two Nexus switches as a single “logical” port channel to the connecting upstream or downstream device.

●    Feature LLDP - Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP), a vendor-neutral device discovery protocol, allows the discovery of both Cisco devices and devices from other sources.

●    Feature NX-API – NX-API improves the accessibility of CLI by making it available outside of the switch by using HTTP/HTTPS. This feature helps with configuring the Cisco Nexus switch remotely using the automation framework.

●    Feature UDLD – Enables unidirectional link detection for various interfaces.

●    Feature DHCP - Allows for the configuration of DHCP relay agent, DHCP snooping, or any of the features that depend on DHCP

●    Feature scp-server - Enables the SCP (Secure Copy) server on the Cisco NX-OS device in order to copy files and from a remote device.

●    Feature bgp (optional) – enables bgp to be used between ToR and aggregation router

Configure VLANs

The table below provides the VLANs created for different traffics used in this solution.

Create Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) Switched Virtual Interfaces (SVI)

These interfaces can be considered optional if the subnets of the VLANs used within the environment are managed entirely by an upstream switch, but if that is the case, all managed VLANs will need to be carried up through the vPC to the Upstream switches.  

Routing between the SVIs is directly connected between them as they reside in the same Virtual Routing and Forwarding in-stance (VRF), and traffic set to enter and exit the VRF will traverse the default gateway set for the switches.

Create the vPC Domain

Create a vPC domain ID with a unique number (from 1 -1000) and configure the role priority and peer-keepalive on both the switches. The vPC domain ID is same on both switches and this will handle the vPC settings specified within the switches. Note that the commands for role priority value and peer-keepalive varies slightly on both switches.

On each switch, configure the Port Channel member interfaces that will be part of the vPC Peer Link and configure the vPC Peer Link:

QoS Configuration on ToR Switches (Cisco Nexus 9300 series switches)

This procedure explains the QoS configuration example for supporting RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) traffic on the ToR switches.

Using Cisco Modular Quality of Service Command Line Interface (MQC), you can define and configure QOS policies by following these steps:

1.     Define a particular class of traffic.

2.     After creating class-map, we put them in to a policy-map, where we mark (using bandwidth, policing, shaping, and so on) the traffic.

3.     Use a service-policy command to apply that p-map to an interface in inbound or outbound direction.

Note:   The QoS configuration in the host OS should match the QoS configuration performed in the Network switch (ToR) configuration

Create class-map type QoS and match based on CoS Value

In the following example, RDMA (for storage traffic) and CLUSTER-COMM (for cluster heartbeat traffic) traffic classes are defined and matched with layer 2 CoS 4 and CoS 5 respectively for classification.

Create policy-map type QoS and Set qos-group and add/or Policing Rule

A policy-map named AzS_HCI_QoS is created and referenced to RDMA and CLUSTER-COMM class-maps and set the qos-group accordingly as shown in the following example.

Attach policy-map type QoS as Input to an Interface

The policy-map created in the previous step is now applied to interfaces port-channel 10 and interfaces ethernet 1/1-4, where all Azure Stack HCI cluster nodes are connected.

Create class-map type network-qos and match based on qos-group Value

The network QoS policy defines the characteristics of QoS properties network wide.

Two class-map type network-qos named RDMA_CL_Map_NetQoS and Cluster-Comm_CL_Map_NetQoS are created and matched with qos-group 4 and qos-group 5, respectively.

Create policy-map type network-qos and Define Actions

In this example, the QoS network policy created to set Jumbo MTU for both traffic classes and no-drop (pause) to only RoCE traffic. During congestion, PFC sends a pause frame that indicates which CoS values needs to be paused  This network-qos policy is then applied to the system.

Note:   For the drop and no drop configuration, you also need to enable PFC per port.

Create policy-map Type Queuing Referencing with the system-defined class-map Type Queuing and Create Actions

A policy map with minimum bandwidth percentage guarantee is specified to traffic class in periods of congestion - 50% is allocated to RDMA (storage) traffic, 49% is allocated to management and compute traffic and 1% is allocated to cluster heartbeat traffic.

Weighted random early detection (WRED) with minimum and maximum thresholds is also set to drop packets when the configured thresholds are exceeded. WRED configured with ECN (explicit congestion notification) marks packets instead of dropping them when the average queue length exceeds a specific threshold value. With WRED ECN feature, end hosts use this marking as signal that the network is congested to slow down sending packets.

Attach policy-map Queuing to Interfaces

The example below shows policy-map queuing and priority-flow-control on are applied to ethernet 1/1-4 interfaces. Azure Stack HCI cluster nodes are connected to these interfaces.

The example in the following table shows the full running-configuration of both ToR switches used for this deployment in a fully converged network topology.

About the Author

Sanjeev Naldurgkar, Technical Leader, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Sanjeev Naldurgkar is a technical leader on the Cisco UCS Solutions Engineering and Technical Marketing team, focusing on Microsoft solutions that include Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack HCI, and Azure. His two decades of IT experience span multiple companies including Microsoft. Sanjeev holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering, along with leading industry certifications from Microsoft and VMware.

Acknowledgements

For their support and contribution to the design, validation, and creation of this Cisco Validated Design, we would like to thank:

●    Tyson Scott, Cisco Systems, Inc.

●    John McAbel, Cisco Systems, Inc.

●    Babu Mahadevan, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Feedback

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