Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

In Windows 10 Fall Creator Update, Microsoft introduced a new feature called the “Hyper-V Quick Create Wizard” which is very useful because you can create a Virtual Machine with the default settings and save time. Using this feature, you can create a VM with a single ISO file located on your system, or you can create a VM from the Online Gallery. By default, Quick Create will list a Windows 10 Developer Environment but you can easily add your own Virtual Machine Images from your local/online repository. In this article, I will describe how to use this feature and how to add a custom VM Image into your own Gallery.

Microsoft released a few weeks ago a new feature, to backup your SQL Server databases, directly from Azure Backup.  This new functionality is very interesting and is working smoothly for a preview. Adding of other databases types like Oracle, MySQL, PostGre, etc. could be very interesting.

You’re on VMWare ESX 5.5, 6 or 6.5 and you want to migrate to Azure? Don’t worry, it’s pretty simple now, just follow this article. To start, you must run one of the following VMWare version, supported by Microsoft, 5.5, 6.0 or 6.5. After that, you need an Azure subscription to be able to migrate to Azure.