Microsoft Azure Stack HCI on Intel-Based Lenovo ThinkSystem V3 Servers

Deploying hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has become the de-facto standard for organizations looking to modernize their aging infrastructure. Large storage deployments are increasingly being replaced by HCI based solutions for most general-purpose workloads. HCI has proven to deliver better efficiency and price performance in the datacenter. Additionally, customers have been choosing a hybrid approach, migrating certain workloads to the cloud, while keeping other workloads on-premises.

Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft’s HCI solution for customers that wish to run workloads on-premises and extend easily to Azure for hybrid capabilities such as back-up, site recovery, storage, cloud-based monitoring and more.

Azure Stack HCI is a new HCI host operating system from Microsoft, delivered as an Azure service, providing the latest and up-to-date security, performance, and feature updates. Azure Stack HCI builds on the foundation of the Microsoft Windows Server Software Defined program and provides a certification path for Storage Spaces Direct solutions.

Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Series (Integrated Systems and Certified Nodes) combine the Storage Spaces Direct technology included in this new host OS, with industry leading Lenovo ThinkSystem servers to deliver HCI building blocks for your infrastructure solutions. Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Integrated Systems map to Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Integrated Systems and ThinkAgile MX Certified Nodes map to Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Validated Nodes.

ThinkAgile MX Series are built with certified hardware components, are easily orderable as appliances, and include deployment/update features built into Windows Admin Center. Benefits like these allow businesses to deploy solutions quickly and easily.

• Simplicity: Lenovo XClarity integrates with Windows Admin Center from Microsoft, providing a unified single-pane-of-glass simple management experience across infrastructure, virtual machines, software, and hardware.
• Flexibility: ThinkAgile MX Nodes offer a wide range of processor, memory, and storage options to provide the maximum flexibility for customizing your infrastructure.
• Faster time to value: In traditional IT, a solution is designed, tested, implemented, and maintained requires significant time and energy. With HCI, this burden has been transferred to the solution provider. Microsoft created S2D to solve the storage challenge and Azure Stack HCI solutions to ensure robust and viable platforms.

Lenovo has designed, tested, and validated ThinkAgile MX Series offerings to provide the solutions you need quickly and easily, with confidence, and exceeding the stringent requirements of today’s IT. The result is that you can quickly deploy a robust, high-performance HCI solution and rapidly solve your IT challenges.

ThinkAgile MX models based on the ThinkSystem SR650 V3 2U server node and ThinkSystem SR630 V3 1U server node are equipped with two powerful 5th generation or 4th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, providing extreme reliability, huge internal storage and memory capacity, and a large number of I/O slots, making it an ideal foundation for this solution.

The SR650 V3 configurations used in this solution are storage dense, with a high-performance 4-SSD/NVMe cache tier and a 14-HDD capacity tier, along with two mirrored boot drives.

ThinkAgile MX also provides an All-Flash offering, with a high-performance 4-NVMe cache tier and 20-SSD capacity tier. You can start with as few as a single node and grow up to 16 nodes.

The SR630 V3 configurations provide an alternative in the smaller 1U form factor. They are available with a high-performance 2-SSD/NVMe cache tier and a 10-HDD capacity tier.

ThinkAgile MX is also available in a smaller form factor platform based on the ThinkSystem SE350 as the ThinkAgile MX1000 Series (MX1021 Certified Node & MX1020 Integrated Systems). Its small footprint and power efficiency allow for reliable server-class performance at many Edge locations. With additional benefits of ruggedness and variety of mounting options, these servers are ideal for small locations.

This server can handle temperatures from 0° to 55°C, as well as tolerate locations with high-dust and vibration. The half-width, short-depth, 1U server can be installed almost anywhere: hung on a wall, stacked on a shelf, or mounted in a rack. This high-performance server, using the Intel Xeon-D processor, features 8 to 16 cores, and a variety of storage options.

Lenovo ThinkSystem servers consistently rank high in customer satisfaction and have been rated #1 in x86 server reliability for 9 years running¹. They are also known for their high performance, with 537 current world record benchmarks (as of March 1, 2024).

ThinkAgile MX Integrated Systems include Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, and optionally include Windows Server 2022 Datacenter in case you require unlimited guest OS virtual machine licenses. ThinkAgile MX Certified Nodes optionally include the Azure Stack HCI software or Windows Server 2022 Datacenter depending on your needs. The Azure Stack HCI OS license provides the following benefits:

• Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): State of the art software-defined storage from Microsoft with multiple high-performance resiliency options, deduplication, compression and more.
• Windows Admin Center (WAC): A web-based management portal is included with the software at no extra cost. Deployment and update features in WAC make deployment extremely simple and easy to perform. Additionally, Lenovo’s XClarity plugin allows you to deploy hardware as well as software from the same interface, enabling a single pane of management.
• Hyper-V: Hypervisor is included in the license
• Software-Defined Networking: Features such as virtual network encryption, firewall auditing, virtual network peering allows you to get the benefits of a more secure software defined network with Azure Stack HCI.
• Azure Stack HCI is hybrid by design, and you can benefit from native integration with Azure ARC and Azure Monitor and connect to Azure for a variety of Azure hybrid services seamlessly. Fleet management for hosts and VMs allows you to monitor and manage clusters at scale.

Lenovo and Lenovo partners have a comprehensive portfolio of professional services that supports the full life cycle of your infrastructure. At every stage—from planning to deployment, optimization, support, and end of life—extra help is available to accelerate meeting your business objectives.

Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Series are the flexible building blocks for your Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solutions.

With co-located engineering organizations and a history of technical collaboration, Microsoft and Lenovo consistently deliver innovative joint solutions for the data center. Lenovo’s leadership in reliability, customer satisfaction, and performance, combined with Microsoft’s leadership in software and cloud services, continues to deliver innovative data center solutions and lower TCO for our joint customers.

Why Lenovo

Lenovo is a leading provider of x86 servers for the data center. Featuring rack, tower, blade, dense and converged systems, the Lenovo server portfolio provides excellent performance, reliability and security. Lenovo also offers a full range of storage, software, solutions, and comprehensive services supporting business needs throughout the IT lifecycle.

For More Information

To learn more about ThinkAgile MX Certified Nodes, contact your Lenovo representative or Business Partner, or visit lenovo.com/thinkagile. For detailed specifications, consult the ThinkAgile MX product guides.

¹ITIC Global Reliability Study, lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1117.