Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Now that you deploy Cloudyn (see the other article), we will connect our AWS environment to have only one interface, to manage cost for all our cloud provider subscription. Be careful, from June, this interface will not be free anymore for AWS. It’ll cost you 1% of your annual subscription consumption.

Some months ago, Microsoft acquires the Cloudyn company. This company developed an interface to manage your cost and to have billing information, for one or multiple subscription, on one console. They support some other cloud service provider like AWS and Google Cloud, it’s why it’s very interesting. For Azure, it’s free of charge to use this software. You can connect your EA, CSP or other subscription. For AWS, it’s free until June, after it will cost 1% of your revenue (on AWS or Google Cloud).

In this article, I will describe how to manage Windows Containers via GUI. Docker provides a great Docker CLI that allows us to create, interact, and delete containers, but sometimes it’s nice to have an interface to manage Containers. There are many admins who much prefer a GUI tool to handle every task and it can be useful to use an interface when you have many containers to manage or if you start working with Docker. In this article, I don’t want to judge which GUI is better because it depends! You must use the GUI that will suit your needs. So do not hesitate to test this GUI.

Looking back at the previous articles in our “How-to-Core basics”, we have managed to install the Core version of Windows Server 2016. As well, the required networks were set, and the storage for the virtual machines was created. In the final part of the trilogy, I’ll cover the steps left to prepare the environment in order to make your production highly available and fault-tolerant.

Most every application we run in our datacenters today provides some sort of web-based interface.  The push to move to HTML5, API driven GUIs is a good one – we can access things from anywhere, using any device or browser.  The problem being we are also seeing a push for security, more specifically ensuring that all our web accessible interfaces are running through SSL and only accessed through https. To get around this administrators can go out and purchase a certificate from a trusted authority, however this could get pretty expensive if you start adding up all of the self-signed certificates within your environment.  Another answer – the Microsoft Certificate Server.

In part of my job, I audit some Hyper-V clusters to remediate issues such as Live Migration. Most of the time, Live Migration part is not well configured. For example, the wrong network is selected or authentication is left to CredSSP. In this topic, I’ll show you how I configure Live Migration in Hyper-V clusters (S2D or not).

I guess once you will read through this article you will also notice how this technology is shaped out of familiar building blocks, but what I also hope for is that you will get a grasp of what is AlwaysOn, and get a basic understanding of how it works. I will fully cover installation and configuration of SQL Server AlwaysOn environment (using new and shiny SQL Server 2017) in my next article while focusing on technology overview here.

One day, any VMware administrator may require the so-called “support bundle” which contains log-files, diagnostic information, and performance metrics. Taken together, these parameters allow troubleshooting VMware vSphere. The bundle provides VMware GSS (Global Support Services) the insight into virtualized environment configuration which allows them to resolve issues, when a client submits a support ticket with this bundle attached.

In this article, I will not explain what is and what is not DevOps. I just want to describe how to implement a DevOps Project in your Azure subscription through the new service called “DevOps Projects”. This new service has been released in November 2017. The “DevOps Projects” service allows you to deploy and monitor your application in Azure. Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Services are Microsoft’s DevOps solutions for Azure. I’m not a VS or TFS expert, but as you will see, implementing DevOps with Azure is very straightforward. Microsoft says that you can implement your project in less than 5 minutes! Let’s see if it’s true.