Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

I run a few small non-AWS hosted VM’s for things like my blog and email. These VM’s are typically run on LAMP stack style environments with a few customizations for monitoring and reporting that I like to run on the servers. Because of the hosted nature of the servers, I will admit that I did not always back up the content as often as I should.

If you ever worked with vSphere, you definitely used at least one of those. However, in HCX they are used with Secure Proxy. All migration traffic is proxied via HCX WAN Interconnect appliance (WAN-IX). Deployed WAN-IX simulates new ESXi host under local vCenter. You can actually see it in the Web Client inventory. From the point of view of vCenter and other ESXi host the WAN-IX is just another regular host.

VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is probably one of the most underestimated VMware products. Even amongst virtualization experts, very few people know what it is, and what value it can bring to the companies. The VMware HCX is a platform that erases borders between on-prem and cloud datacenters. It delivers app mobility and creates infrastructure hybridity across vSphere 5.0 and newer versions.

VMware introduced REST API in VMware Fusion 10, the desktop virtualization platform for MacOS, back in the last fall. This interface enables to orchestrate not only the virtualization platform itself but also virtual machines running on top of it. Exact the same REST API appeared in the recently released VMware Workstation 2018 Tech Preview. However, there’s a small thing about the API for Workstation: it works only on Windows hosts so far.

Typically, Content Libraries are used for keeping VM templates, vApp templates, ISO files, and all that jazz you typically share within your network. With such capability, that thing makes vSphere admins’ life easier allowing them to ensure consistency within the infrastructure under workloads. So, if you have never used it before, it may be high time to learn more about Content Libraries. Learn the basics of working with Content Libraries in VMware vSphere in the full article by Paolo Valsecchi.

Microsoft has recently released Windows Server 2019 Insider Preview Build which is the latest release of Windows Server vNext LTSC (Long-term servicing channel). This update contains Desktop Experience and Server Core in eighteen server languages. Also, it includes an English Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel release. And, that’s not all: the build includes the first Microsoft Hyper-V Server preview. In today’s post, we will talk about what to expect from this build, its known issues, and terms of use.

VMware ESXi has an option which allows us to revert back to previous version after upgrade. You might need it in case you don’t see your network card (driver not on the ISO) or you see the NIC perfectly, but network isn’t stable after your upgrade.

For the first time, Microsoft made an online Windows Server Summit at June 26th 2019. Microsoft talked about hybrid cloud, security, cloud native application and hyperconverged solution. Some of the new features which are coming with Windows Server 2019 were unleashed. In this topic, I’d like to summary what are the new features and why you should consider Storage Spaces Direct for a new installation or to update your existing cluster.

If you are an information technology administrator, then by now, you would have known that Microsoft released Cumulative Update 10 for Exchange Server 2016. This update takes Exchange Server 2016 on version number 15.01.1531.003. These latest updates are available now on the download center. These new updates have addressed many issues of the previous versions which range from issues related to security or quality reported by the customers to updates in functionalities. This Exchange Server update also comes with important changes to installation prerequisites.  In today’s post, we will talk about the updated prerequisites, details about this version and how to install the update. So, without any more delay, let us start.