This is a continuation of a series of articles on hosting solutions and services on Azure public cloud with the most recent discussion on Multitenancy here. The previous articles introduced serverless batch processing with durable functions in Azure Container Instances. This article introduces multitenancy via hyperconvergence.  

Hyperconverged infrastructure integrates compute, storage, networking, virtualization and automation into a single system that is delivered via an appliance or software that can be installed on an existing hardware.

The advantages of a hyperconverged over conventional infrastructure include the following:

1.      It increases agility for IT systems to be brought online and scaled out to support dynamic businesses. When new resources are needed, a hyperconverged infrastructure can transition from power on to provisioning readiness within a short time.

2.      It reduces upfront capital and operational costs because there are fewer components that are required in conventional infrastructures. There are no more specialists needed for each discipline as there were with conventional datacenters and which made integration harder. The holistic and integrated approach in hyperconverged saves costs.

3.      This system is prebuilt and workload optimized which reduces complexity. The blocks of architecture can be easily assembled by “snapping” them together and this permits scaling seamlessly.

4.      By providing one platform, it helps to transition applications and resources to the cloud. The deployment of applications to a hyperconverged infrastructure paves the way for deploying to cloud as cloud native applications and reduces a number of concerns from the applications.

5.      This system is performant and resilient and it is quick and affordable way to modernize IT infrastructure with it. This helps businesses operate securely, and efficiently.

Virtualization is a tenet of most hyperconverged systems.  The hypervisor included for virtualization enables multiple operating systems to be hosted and enable nesting. Clusters are deployed to distribute operational functions across nodes and enable scalability with the addition of new nodes.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is sometimes referred to as a datacenter in a box because the initial cabling and minimal networking configuration. A single vendor can now provide servers, storage and the hypervisor making it easier to support, patch, upgrade, and manage the resources. This reduces costs, time to deploy and training requirements for personnel.

Since the storage is directly embedded, many inefficiencies from legacy protocols are avoided. It also improves efficiency and performance. Manageability improves with a native hypervisor.

Some of the considerations towards the appropriateness of a HCI for business needs include: licensing and support, use of embedded storage or virtual storage appliance, combination and scalability with hybrid resources, native backup and disaster recovery capabilities and integration with cloud computing.