Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Solutions on Lenovo ThinkSystem ST250 V2

Accelerate your Business

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 hybrid cloud 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. Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with Azure Arc on Lenovo servers is the perfect hybrid cloud solution to help our joint customers on their modernization journey.

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 features. 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 has designed, tested, and validated ThinkSystem ST250 V2 Azure Stack HCI validated nodes to provide quick and easy solutions for small-to-medium businesses. The result is that you can quickly deploy a robust, high-performance hybrid cloud solution and rapidly solve your IT challenges.

Figure 1. A Lenovo ThinkSystem ST250 V2 server is shown. It is a black tower server with multiple front-accessible drive bays.

Reliability: Powered by Lenovo Servers

The Lenovo ThinkSystem ST250 V2 is a mainstream 1-socket tower server that can also be rack mounted as a rack server. It is ideal for small-to-medium businesses, remote offices, branch offices, banking and public sector. The server supports the new Intel Xeon E-2300 Series processors, formerly codenamed "Rocket Lake".

The ThinkSystem ST250 V2 is an entry-level server with enterprise-grade management features and support for hot-swap power supplies and drives. It offers full support of Lenovo XClarity Administrator for comprehensive systems management and includes the next generation UEFI-based Lenovo XClarity Provisioning Manager for system setup and diagnosis, and the Lenovo XClarity Controller management processor for ongoing systems management and alerting. These tools make the ST250 V2 easy to deploy, integrate, service, and manage.

Lenovo ThinkSystem servers are high performance systems, with nearly 300 world record benchmarks (as of October 1, 2022), and have been ranked #1 in reliability among x86 servers for the past eight years (ITIC).

Excellent Value

Lenovo Azure Stack HCI offerings use the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI operating system on the host nodes, and optionally include Windows Server 2022 Datacenter in case you require unlimited guest OS virtual machine licenses. The Azure Stack HCI OS license provides the following benefits:

• Storage Spaces Direct: 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 software is recommended for managing an Azure Stack HCI cluster. Deployment and update features in WAC make deployment extremely simple and easy to perform. Additionally, Lenovo's XClarity plugin allows you to deploy their hardware as well as software from the same interface, enabling single pane of management. Cluster-aware updating features makes it easy to streamline software and firmware updates in a single maintenance window.
• Hyper-V: Hypervisor is included in the license
• Software-Defined Networking: Features such as virtual network encryption, firewall auditing, and virtual network peering allow 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.

Specifications

Key Features

The ThinkSystem ST250 V2 is an office-friendly tower server that has been optimized to provide enterprise-class features to small businesses, retail, educational institutions and branch offices.

Scalability and performance

The ST250 V2 offers the following features to boost performance, improve scalability, and reduce costs:

• Improved single-socket processor performance:
  • Intel Xeon E-2300 Series processors ("Rocket Lake-E") up to 8 cores and core speeds up to 3.7 GHz
  • Intel Pentium G6405, G6505 and G6605 processors ("Comet Lake Refresh") with 2 cores and core speeds up to 4.3 GHz
• Up to four 3200 MHz DDR4 ECC UDIMMs provide speed and capacity of up to 128 GB
• Four PCIe slots for I/O expansion, one of which has the new PCIe Gen4 interface to maximize I/O performance.
• Flexible storage configurations support either 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hot-swap drive bays or a combination of the two (hybrid configuration). Drive bays support SAS and SATA HDDs and SSDs.
  • Up to 16x 2.5-inch hot-swap drive bays
  • Up to 8x 3.5-inch hot-swap drive bays
  • Up to 4x 3.5-inch + 8x 2.5-inch drive bays
• The server also supports simple-swap drives, include 1x NVMe drive:
  • Up to 8x 3.5-inch SATA drive bays
  • Up to 7x 3.5-inch SATA drive bays + 1x 3.5-inch NVMe drive bay
• The use of solid-state drives (SSDs) instead of, or along with, traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) can significantly improve I/O performance. An SSD can support up to 100 times more I/O operations per second (IOPS) than a typical HDD
• New high-speed RAID controllers from Lenovo and Broadcom provide 12 Gb SAS connectivity to the drive backplanes
• Offers two 5.25-inch media bays with support for optical drives or backup drives
• Supports two M.2 drives for OS boot support with RAID redundancy
• The server has two integrated Gigabit Ethernet ports
• The server offers one PCIe 4.0 slot plus three PCIe 3.0 I/O expansion slots
• Support for a NVIDIA GPU for enhanced workload performance

As Much Help As You Need

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

Lenovo and Microsoft

With co-located engineering organizations and a history of technical collaboration, Microsoft and Lenovo consistently deliver innovative joint solutions for the data center and for edge scenarios. 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 and edge solutions and lower TCO for our joint customers.

For More Information

To learn more about ThinkSystem ST250 V2 server, contact your Lenovo representative or Business Partner, or visit https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1548-thinksystem-st250-v2

Microsoft Azure Stack HCI catalog: https://azurestackhcisolutions.azure.microsoft.com/#/catalog?Manufacturer=Lenovo

NEED STORAGE?

Learn more about Lenovo Storage https://www.lenovo.com/systems/storage

NEED SERVICES?

Learn more about Lenovo Services https://www.lenovo.com/systems/services

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• Microsoft Alliance
• ThinkSystem ST250 V2 Server

Notices

Lenovo may not offer the products, services, or features discussed in this document in all countries. Consult your local Lenovo representative for information on the products and services currently available in your area. Any reference to a Lenovo product, program, or service is not intended to state or imply that only that Lenovo product, program, or service may be used. Any functionally equivalent product, program, or service that does not infringe any Lenovo intellectual property right may be used instead. However, it is the user's responsibility to evaluate and verify the operation of any other product, program, or service. Lenovo may have patents or pending patent applications covering subject matter described in this document. The furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents. You can send license inquiries, in writing, to:

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Attention: Lenovo Director of Licensing

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This information could include technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. Changes are periodically made to the information herein; these changes will be incorporated in new editions of the publication. Lenovo may make improvements and/or changes in the product(s) and/or the program(s) described in this publication at any time without notice.

The products described in this document are not intended for use in implantation or other life support applications where malfunction may result in injury or death to persons. The information contained in this document does not affect or change Lenovo product specifications or warranties. Nothing in this document shall operate as an express or implied license or indemnity under the intellectual property rights of Lenovo or third parties. All information contained in this document was obtained in specific environments and is presented as an illustration. The result obtained in other operating environments may vary. Lenovo may use or distribute any of the information you supply in any way it believes appropriate without incurring any obligation to you.

Any references in this publication to non-Lenovo Web sites are provided for convenience only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of those Web sites. The materials at those Web sites are not part of the materials for this Lenovo product, and use of those Web sites is at your own risk. Any performance data contained herein was determined in a controlled environment. Therefore, the result obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. Some measurements may have been made on development-level systems and there is no guarantee that these measurements will be the same on generally available systems. Furthermore, some measurements may have been estimated through extrapolation. Actual results may vary. Users of this document should verify the applicable data for their specific environment.

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This document, LP1666, was created or updated on November 15, 2022.

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