Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

A Kemp LoadMaster appliance is a critical service for load balancing and application content delivery. Thanks to flexible deployment options for a wide range of hypervisors and cloud platforms, Kemp LoadMaster allows you to distribute user traffic and improve application performance in private and hybrid cloud systems intelligently and efficiently. At the same time, usually Kemp is in front of critical services such as E-mail, web applications, SharePoint and if you lose it, you’ll get service outage. Deploying an HA cluster will solve this problem and provide a high availability, especially for a physical appliance!

Migration of virtual machines is an important feature of virtualization technology that allows applications to move transparently along with their runtime environments between physical machines. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) allows the migration of one or multiple on-premises virtual machines to AWS in an easy way from a single pane of glass. Plan, automate, and track step-by-step replication of running server volumes with just one tool — the AWS console!

Windows Server 2019 was released on the 4th of October 2019. This was a very expected and highly attended release of the latest Microsoft Server Operating System (OS). Microsoft has also released a new free utility called Windows Admin Center (WAC), which can manage your whole production environment via a web-based console.

Nowadays we often meet systems with RDMA connections configured for increasing the performance of the system. Also, it’s not a news that we can meet environments with the different OS installed. In our case, we will be looking into a vital aspect of the process – the performance of RDMA connections. So, let’s have a look at the configuration of RDMA and what we need for building and testing RDMA connections, problems that you possibly can face, and the final part is making it perform in a way that will make us happy. So, let’s start.

Kemp provides a product called LoadMaster that provides a load balancer. Load Master is available in physical and virtual appliances. The virtual appliance is also called VLM (Virtual LoadMaster). LoadMaster can be deployed either in On-Prem and in Microsoft Azure. Today I wanted to show you how to deploy a VLM and the first configuration steps.

Does low latency, high throughput & CPU offloading require RDMA? What? Blasphemy, how dare we even question this? In my defense, I’m not questioning anything. I am merely being curious. I’m the inquisitive kind. The need for RDMA is the premise that we have been working with ever since RDMA became available outside of HPC InfiniBand fabrics. For us working in the Windows ecosystem this was with SMB Direct. Windows Server 2012 was the OS version that introduced us to SMB Direct, which leverages RDMA.

In this article, I discuss what VSAN from StarWind for vSphere is and how to set it up on the hardware RAID. StarWind VSAN for vSphere is a Software-Defined Storage solution that is designed specifically for vSphere environments. It comes as a preconfigured VM template, so just a couple of quick steps are needed to start running your vSphere environment on StarWind VSAN: download the solution, deploy it, and “play”. Here, I want to share some tips and tricks on working with VSAN for vSphere.

This article describes StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze as a solution to make local backup applications operate seamlessly with a cloud object storage. This all-in-one solution combines the ability of a backup storage pool to offload the backup data to Backblaze B2 cloud storage, and immediately retrieve it – all at a bargain price.

One new announced feature in Windows Server 2019 is Storage Migration Service (SMS). SMS enables to ease drastically the migration from a file server to another. Moreover, SMS is fully manageable from Windows Admin Center as Microsoft has released an extension for this feature.