Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

There are many anti-spam tools. And they are pretty good. For example, better-known and reliable domains can be added to your whitelist. However, spoofed emails will always be redone because they represent legitimate business emails. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is a mechanism that will protect your email box and will allow you to get rid of annoying spam, ensuring verification of the sender’s domain. Stop spam emails right now!

After rolling out Windows Server 2019 and Windows Admin Center a month ago, Microsoft said that both were designed with ongoing popularity of all-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments in mind. This being said, let’s talk about the new multifunctional Azure Network Adapter! As you know, large workloads require good connections to VMs in Azure. This can be accomplished by using things like Site-to-Site VPN, Azure Express Route, or Point-to-Site VPN. Here, Azure Network Adapter comes into the play, allowing to connect VMs to the Azure Virtual Network just in one (or two) clicks!

In order to build your own Hyper-V lab in Azure, you need two Hyper-V instances. But, hey, why do we need Hyper-V Replica here? This technology allows you to shift a virtual machine from a server on-prem to Microsoft Azure for maxing out your services uptime. With Hyper-V Replica, returning your services back to the normal functioning becomes a matter of only a few seconds… Looks like a must-have for your Hyper-V environment, doesn’t it?

If you work with Azure close enough, you’ve probably have heard of Nested Virtualization. Yes, it is the feature allowing you to run Hyper-V inside an Azure VM. Why does one need that thing? Well, to build a perfect lab for demos, development, testing, whatever… without buying any extra hardware!

In October 2018, Microsoft officially launched the newest version of Windows Server – Windows Server 2019, and earlier this month it became available to the public. Microsoft is known throughout the globe for its excellent software products, operating systems, computer systems, and other consumer electronics. Windows Server 2019 is the first and the only Microsoft product that went straight to general availability without going through the release to manufacturing (RTM) phase. But, did Windows Server 2019 satisfy the customers’ expectations? What are its main features? Let’s scrutinize from every angle.

IT administrators are always confronted with the problem of building innovative, fast, modern, and reliable IT infrastructure that fits the budget and saves resources for future growth. To commence, you should plan, select, re-plan, clarify goals, and so on ad infinitum in a vicious circle. However, the issue of guaranteeing the data safety will always be relevant on the agenda. Choosing a SAN (Storage Area Network) with the iSCSI protocol as one of the possible storage solutions will ensure data security and constant availability. In addition, this approach is cost-effective in terms of maintenance and support.

Let’s imagine a situation: a power outage went out and an incorrect server shutdown has occurred. Everything is aggravated by the fact that you have no power backup. What will happen to your write operations? They sink into oblivion and data will be lost. But StarWind says “no” to these troubles! Log-structured Write-Back Cache (LSWBC) is a StarWind feature which speeds up the processing of write requests and saves data when the server is incorrectly shut down. What about RAM caching? Your data also will be saved.

Do you know that not every solution requires high available storage? Sometimes there is a need in functionality that gives us the option not to leverage any OS caching. Precisely this UseWriteThrough option you can find in the New-SBMMapping commandlet in Windows Server 2019. It allows a user to disable caching with SMB mappings in certain scenarios thus giving a possibility to prefer reliability over performance in non-continuously available file share scenarios. So, always check “paper proof of concepts” and find the best options for your IT infrastructure and business development!

One, two, three … Let’s roll! StarWind presents an updated functionality of V2V Converter. The utility enables conversion of a physical machine into a virtual one (P2V) and other way around. For example, you have a server with Windows Server 2012R2 installed running some critical application. With physical-to-virtual (P2V) entire host or specific physical drive (or volume) can be migrated. What else? The pressure is on! Now your VMs can be migrated directly between Hyper-V and ESXi (and backwards). Moreover, StarWind V2V Converter offers bi-directional conversion between all the major VM formats: VMDK, VHD/VHDX (Windows Repair Mode aware), QCOW2, and StarWind native IMG.