Or should we expressed it differently, Hulu welcomes AWS but Dropbox moves away? I guess is still semantics, the information is the same. But the positive or negative connotation will depend on what service do you consider more relevant: Hulu or Dropbox. The fact still remains that Dropbox recently decided to opt for building their own cloud and Hulu is now one more streaming media company using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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Introduction

Window Server 2016 Hyper-V brought us Switch Embedded teaming (SET). That’s the way forward when it comes to converged networking and Software-Defined Networking with the network controller and network virtualization.  It also allows for the use of RDMA on a management OS virtual NIC (vNIC).

One of the capabilities within SET is affinitizing a vNIC to a particular team member, that is a physical NIC (pNIC). This isn’t a hard requirement for SET to work properly but it helps in certain scenarios. With a vNIC we mean either a management OS vNIC or a virtual machine vNIC actually, affinitizing can be done for both. The main use case and focus here and in real life is in the management OS vNICs we use for SMB Direct traffic.

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Introduction

Greetings, fellow sysadmins and everyone who is still wondering how to make their SQL server highly available! You’re just in time since I’ve prepared for you detailed guidelines with pictures and explanations on how to achieve this goal by using the SQL Server AlwaysOn approach! The great thing is that we are also going to configure and review the full-fledged system with the disaster recovery scenarios implemented. I’ve decided to break this topic into 3 parts. First, we will go through the process of configuring AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance (FCI), the next part of this series will cover the deployment of a DR site for our cluster using AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and finally, we will learn more about how to achieve the same using 3rd party software.

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Creating automation and orchestration requires taking multiple data center components which all speak different languages and chaining them together through one consistent workflow.  Now there are a lot of programming and scripting languages that we can use as our orchestration engine such as Java, JavaScript, Perl, etc. – but one of the most common choices within the last 5 years has been PowerShell.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are completing one of the most relevant partnerships around cloud services: VMware will offer their Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) capabilities within AWS. With this partnership, VMware finally replaces the already sold vCloud Air cloud services.

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At Microsoft Build 2017, the Nested Virtualization support in Azure has been announced. Now you can enable nested virtualization using the Dv3 and Ev3 VM sizes – not a wide variety, but Microsoft is going to expand the support for more VM sizes in the upcoming months.

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Before we have started our journey through the storage world, I would like to begin with a side note on what is hyperconverged infrastructure and which problems this cool word combination really solves.

Folks who already took the grip on hyperconvergence can just skip the first paragraph where I’ll describe HCI components plus a backstory about this tech.

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a term coined by two great guys: Steve Chambers and Forrester Research (at least Wiki said so). They’ve created this word combination in order to describe a fully software-defined IT infrastructure that is capable of virtualizing all the components of conventional ‘hardware-defined’ systems.

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When you implement a virtual infrastructure, you may want to convert your physical servers to virtual to improve your datacenter consolidation. In this topic, we will see how to convert a physical Linux server to a VMware VM. To make this conversion, I used VMware vCenter Converter Standalone.

Install VMware vCenter Converter Standalone

To host VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, you need a physical or virtual machine based on Windows Server. Usually, when I run this tool, I use a virtual machine. Then run the executable to process the product installation.

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You can install Exchange Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016 with either PowerShell or Graphical User Interface (GUI). However, in this article, I’ll focus on installation with the help of GUI.

Installing Prerequisites

To get started, join the server machine with domain and then install the latest update (which is KB4034661 at the time of writing this guide) on Windows Server 2016. You can check the update history from the following location:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4034661

Open Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges and run the sconfig utility. Write number 6 and then hit Enter from the keyboard.

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This is going to be the third article in the series of reviewing and understanding Azure Stack (previous articles: Azure Stack Release and Deployment Models). Now that we have a good grasp of the platform, how the Integrated Systems come into play and features available; I want to extend the topics to other two important matters for existing customers of Azure: How the support model will work with hardware and software in place from different vendors; and what’s the interconnection with the already existing Azure Pack solution.

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