I am going to try to address a few issues I have seen quite a lot in my virtualization career. It is not that you have to take extra care when virtualizing, but your virtual environment will never be better than the foundation you build it on. The reason you do not see that many people fuss about it in non-virtualized environments (anymore). I believe, that resources are in abundance today. Well, they were so ten years ago as well, but since then we have only seen higher and higher specification on server hardware. It was the reason for starting to virtualize. Do not get me wrong – Lots of people care about the performance of their virtual and physical environments. Yet some have not set them self up for a successful virtualization project. Let me elaborate…

In this article, we are going to continue testing Synology DS916+ with VSAN from StarWind. Our main goal today is to improve the performance of Synology boxes specifically on random patterns. Randoms were chosen for a reason. SQL and OLTP workloads tend to cause huge stress, especially, to spindle arrays, generating a heavily randomized I/O. Patterns we are choosing for today’s benchmark are common for such environments. There are different approaches, which can handle these workload types, such as caching and tiering. Our approach is to build environment with StarWind Log-Structured File System. LSFS was created exactly for this type of environments to improve the performance. We will compare the results we receive to the ones from Part 1 of our research.

The Installation of ESXi 6.5 did not change much since previous release. After you’re download your installation ISO, you need to burn it to a CD-ROM in order to proceed with installation. Know that there is a way to install ESXi from USB stick too. And in this post we will prepare one. You as an administrator or consultant have to have your toolkit with the latest ESXi installer ready in your pocket, so today we’ll show one of the methods to create an ESXi 6.5 installation USB under two minutes. While this method of creation of USB media is quick and it is done under two minutes, it is not always obvious to deal with hardware compatibility and drivers and firmware (combination of those two) for latest vSphere 6.5. At the end of the post we’ll show you few ways how to deal with that.

AT&T, the Texas-based telecommunications company, has just announced two new Internet of Things (IoT) starter kits at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2017 in Las Vegas, one for Amazon Web Services (AWS) developers, the other for developers that use Raspberry Pi.

DiskStation DS916+ is a further improvement of DS415+ model. Storage capacity in DS916+ can be scaled using DX513 expansion units, making a total of nine 3.5 disk bays. Given the relatively small form factor and impressive capacity potential, such configuration may become a great solution for small businesses and enthusiasts.

The new device by Synology, an all-flash NAS named FS3017, marks the first time the vendor has issued something entirely targeted for flash, not simply also supporting it. FS3017 is said to be ideal for big data analysis, video post-production, virtualization, and handling demanding database applications.

Recently, it became known that there is a private, mysterious network stretching between London and Frankfurt that is twice as fast as the normal Internet. The connection, provided by a series of microwave dishes on masts, was completely secret to anyone but one company. Only when a competitor completed its own microwave link between the two cities, the first company revealed that it too had a link between the cities in order to get a share in this potential market. Similar stories can be found all over the world, but because these networks are privately owned, and because they are often used by financial groups trying to find an edge on the stock market and eke out a few extra billions, you have to investigate hard to find them.

If you ever worked in IT, you have heard the acronym RAID.  RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (some call it Inexpensive) Disks. So, it basically refers to a group of disk logically presented as one or more volumes to the external system – a server, for instance. The main two reasons to have RAID are Performance and Redundancy.  With RAID, you can minimize the access time and increase the throughput of data. RAID also allows one or more disks in the array to fail without losing any data.

There was a time when “open source” and “Microsoft” were two words that did not get along, at all. Bill Gates when he was leading the Redmond Company said, even though the free software should be part of the ecosystem, the General Public License (GPL, licenses that used to rule most of the open source projects) has a “Pac-Man-like nature” that was destroying the “healthy ecosystem” for companies. Or even later when he said that the open source software is a “New Communism” (in a despicable way, of course).

Windows Server 2016 enables building a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) with new layers of security and Azure-related approach for hosting business applications and infrastructure. The new Software-Defined Network (SDN) Stack  provides dynamic security and hybrid flexibility by enforcing network policy in the Hyper-V Virtual Switch using the Azure Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP) Switch Extension. Instead of programming network configurations into a physical switch,  the new Microsoft Network Controller delivers the network policy to the Hyper-V Hosts using the OVSDB protocol and is programmed into the VFP extension of the vSwitch by a Host Agent which enforces the policy.