The hyperconverged infrastructure appliance market (HCIA) is growing fast and hardware competitors are using Dell, HP, SuperMicro and other servers and not Cisco’s UCS hardware. EMC only covers a portion of the market so Cisco should address the rest in order to both preserve its current UCS market share and grow it further.
Hyper-converged infrastructure, when we started to hear about it last year, was simply an “appliantization” of the architecture and technology of software-defined storage (SDS) technology running in concert with server virtualization technology. Appliantization means that the gear peddler was doing the heavy lift of pre-integrating server and storage hardware with hypervisor and SDS hardware so that the resulting kit would be pretty much plug-and-play.
For large Hyper-V infrastructure, IT people use often Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to automate tasks as VM deployment. VMM provides profiles (hardware, operating system and application) and then we use these profiles to build a VM Template. Most of the time, a VM Template contains a VM hardware configuration and the OS configuration (join the domain, product key and so on). Then VMs are deployed from templates which decrease the time to deploy a working VM.
On VMware Labs site you can read about new utilities which can simplify the management of VMware vSphere virtualization infrastructure. They help administrators to solve their everyday problems. The following list includes the tools with functions description.
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Warning: This article is written with information related to Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4.
In part one of this multi part blog on How to Configure Storage Replication in Windows Server 2016, we covered an introduction into Storage Replica which is a new feature introduced in Windows Server 2016, and we covered step by step the implementation of Windows Volume Replication (Server-to-server). In this follow up post, we are going to cover the implementation of volume replication with stretch cluster. This type of cluster features uses Asymmetric storage, two sites, two sets of shared storage and uses volume replication to ensure that data is available to all nodes in the cluster.
It used to be that, when you bought a server with a NIC card and some internal or direct attached storage, it was simply called a server. If it had some tiered storage – different media with different performance characteristics and different capacities – and some intelligence for moving data across “tiers,” we called it an “enterprise server”. If the server and storage kit were clustered, we called it a high availability enterprise server. Over the past year, though, we have gone through a collective terminology refresh.
A part of a series, the research is dedicated to the capability of free Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 to assume a file server role and cluster the resulting file server. Our last experiment on this matter showed that it’s possible to create SMB3 File Server on the free Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 and now we’re about to go further and cluster it. The post shows a detailed instruction on the process and also the resulting setup. It appears to be fully working and usable, so the process may be called a success after all. Though it is absolutely real to do so, it is a violation of Microsoft’s license agreement, so StarWind urges everyone to refrain from repeating the experiment.
The first experiment dedicated to building a file server on free Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2. It is a part of a series of similar practical posts. The post offers a detailed instruction on how to assign file server role to the free Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2. However, this process is a violation of license agreement, so StarWind urges the readers not to repeat it. As to the reason the process is at all possible, the answer is quite simple: SMB3 is a crucial part of the free Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 and the latter won’t work if the protocol support is cut out. In any case, a fact that you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Violating Microsoft’s user license agreement is some serious business you don’t want to get involved in.
This is a research dedicated to practical implementation of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. It is a part of a series of posts about S2D and features a detailed comprehensive instruction on building a fault-tolerant 4-node setup. Storage Spaces Direct is the next step of Storage Spaces, meaning it is an extension of the current SDS for Windows Server. Storage Spaces Direct utilizes SMB3 for all intra-node interaction, including the latest SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel. The testing of S2D is hot right now, so StarWind is doing its part as well. This setup is meant to withstand node failures and the post reveals how exactly it performs in this respect.