Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Official Microsoft description: “Azure DevTest Lab is a service that helps developers and testers to quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. You can test latest version of your application by quickly provisioning Windows and Linux environments using reusable templates and artifacts.” In other words, Azure DevTest Labs is a great service that will help you to implement DevOps in your organization. Azure DevTest Labs will allows you to easily deploy Virtual Machines in order to test your workload in Azure. Setting up a development and test environment can take lots of time for your Ops Team.

Imagine you have a server with data source volumes that are backed up to local (or a share) target backup volumes with Veeam Agent for Windows (VAW). You might or might not backup the OS as well. That server is old, has issues or has crashed beyond repair and needs to be replaced. You don’t really care all that much about the server OS potentially but you do care about your data backup history! You don’t want to lose all those restore points. Basically, we try to answer how do you replace the backup server when it’s a local Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 deployment.

You all probably know that our main goal is delivering all the “building blocks” required to construct a full-stack IT infrastructure. This is ensured by a portfolio that has solutions for most business problems for IT systems. With the ever-increasing popularity of cloud computing, StarWind has recently created an easy-entry-to-cloud solution suitable for any businesses. It ensures that your data is always safe and readily available, regardless of outside factors. Before we take a deep dive into StarWind Hybrid Cloud, let’s overview common cloud deployment models.

You may need to move a couple of Azure Virtual Machines from on-premises to your Azure subscription. Thanks to Windows PowerShell, uploading a VM to Azure is really easy to do! You must check only one prerequisite before uploading your VM to Azure: you will need to check what type of virtual hard disk is being used by the virtual machine. Hyper-V can use either VHD or VHDX based virtual hard disks. However, only VHD disks can be uploaded to Azure. Azure does not support VHDX disks.

The most important part of any server infrastructure is the performance of the underlying storage which creates a direct dependency on the performance of the mission-critical applications. With all the available options for selecting the highest-performing underlying storage for your host taken into account, as well as the consideration of a lot of finger pointing once a storage array doesn’t perform according to plan, the responsibility involved makes the decision even more difficult than it seems.

Currently, there are two options for managing StarWind-based infrastructure via web: StarWind Gateway VM and StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). So today, I’m gonna describe the second option which allows easily managing your VSAN from StarWind infrastructure from any point of the world using any web browser. StarWind Linux-based Virtual Storage Appliance is the best way to instantly deploy VSAN from StarWind to test its functions without having to change your already-existing infrastructure. StarWind VSA supports all industry-standard hypervisors such as Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and KVM and includes Web Management Console allowing to use any HTML5-capable web browser. StarWind VSA is really simple to deploy and manage, requiring no special skills from the on-site IT-team.

In our support work very often we face different environments. They can range from three VMs to a hundred of those, with the number of nodes from two to ten. Today, I will tell you about the main features of Failover Cluster 2016, which are applicable to any environment.

VMware vSphere 6.5 is the latest version of the enterprise server virtual platform from VMware, but the new beta it’s already there for testers. Actually the next version it’s (in the beta). If you are building a new infrastructure from scratch the latest stable version is probably the best choices (for most cases); but what about if you have an old environment and you plan to upgrade it?

So we all want our IT infrastructure to be available at hand and manage it from any remote location. Nowadays, it’s nothing special, it’s just a “must-have”. For real, the days of managing your IT environment only from a directly connected device are long gone. IT administrators need flexibility and the ability to access their infrastructure 24/7 no matter where they are. Installing dedicated software every time you need to make some minor changes or just to monitor your environment’s stats is also a no go. Moreover, such software may not be supported on mobile devices.