New configuration guide: Microsoft Azure Stack HCI on HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus

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Most organizations are trying to simplify IT to reduce costs, complexity, and the need for specialized expertise—even as the challenges of explosive data growth are intensifying. Leveraging easy-to-use, yet affordable, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to alleviate some of the strain of delivering demanding, data-centric workloads is a smart move that enables organizations to capitalize on more data.

 

For example, Microsoft Azure Stack HCI provides a software-defined, integrated compute and storage alternative to traditional architecture. The platform, validated and supported by both Microsoft and HPE, makes implementing and managing IT infrastructure a simple and quick task. HPE recently released Microsoft Azure Stack HCI on HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus, a newly combined solution that addresses the needs of organizations looking for an easy-to-deploy and affordable IT infrastructure with the right balance of capacity, density, performance, and security.

The HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus system, like the other members of the HPE Apollo 4000 systems family, is specifically designed to unlock the business value of data at any scale, with ideal economics. It is designed for both ends of the data-centric workload spectrum—from deeper data lakes and archives to performance-demanding machine learning (ML), data analytics, HCI, and cache-intensive workloads. In short, the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus system provides the data infrastructure foundation for any successful data-driven organization.

To further simplify the solution, the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus can be monitored and managed within Microsoft Windows Admin Center (WAC) by leveraging HPE extensions. WAC is the next generation of Windows Server management tools, providing a single pane of glass that consolidates all aspects of local and remote server management including configuring and troubleshooting servers, managing Windows Server workloads, and creating and managing virtual machines (VMs), storage spaces direct volumes, and software-defined networking.

A new, consolidated configuration guide provides guidance on architecting three Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Validated configurations on the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus system. The new validated solutions using the Gen10 Plus system supplement the affordable, capacity-oriented Azure Stack HCI on HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 solution released previously. The new Gen10 Plus system adds to the configuration choices with new performance-oriented options, including the latest processors, more memory, 33% more potential performance, low-latency NVMe data capacity, and select GPU and FPGA accelerator support.

The guide was published to support the latest Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Validated solution testing and contains detailed bills of material on new, official Azure Stack HCI on HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus offerings. To see the configurations and performance testing results, refer to the HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus Azure Stack HCI Solutions Consolidated Configuration Guide.