Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Server Management Tools has been released last week in the preview build. This tool is available in Microsoft Azure to manage servers from a Web-Based GUI and command line. It is able to manage Windows Server 2016 Technical preview running on servers located On-Premises or in Azure as well.

In early February on the Enabling the Digital Enterprise online-event, VMware announced the new versions of its products and technologies planned for release in 2016: • VMware Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode – Enterprise VM management via VMware public cloud • Change in licensing for VMware vSphere, effective from June 30, 2016 • VMware Horizon 7 – countless new opportunities • New capabilities of VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 • Workspace ONE solution announcement • New versions of VMware vCloud Suite 7 and VMware vRealize Suite 7

A new low-cost attack that decrypts sensitive communications in neglectable time has been discovered recently. The attack works against TLS-protected communications using RSA cryptosystem which expose the key through SSLv2, which was retired two decades ago due to vulnerabilities, but still may be supported by some service due to legacy compatibility reasons or misconfigured TLS implementations.  

I will explain to you today how to execute an Azure Automation Runbook through an ASP.NET website who is stored on a free Azure WebApp. To do this, I will use Webhook from the Azure Automation Runbook. I used this article to understand how it works.  

Hyper-Converged Hyper-V solution using Starwind across two buildings When I first started working for my current employer back in 2013 one of the first projects was to address business continuity concerns. The Brief was very… brief… no details other than “we have another building on the site which is linked by fibre optic, if our current physical servers had a problem we want to be back up and running in under 4 hours”. No guidance on what we should use or how to accomplish this, so off I went in search for solutions.

This is a follow up post on a post we have done previously – How To Convert EXE To MSI Package In 5 Easy Steps – where we created a MSI package for an application that did not exists as MSI, so we had no choice. We used third party software to repackage our application.

When a large Hyper-V infrastructure is deployed, often Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is installed. It enables to deploy logical switches which are mainly VM Switches and virtual network adapters for Live-Migration, Backup, heartbeat, storage or management purposes. However small or medium business doesn’t necessarily implement VMM because it is expensive or not well-known. Even if you don’t use VMM, you can deploy consistency VM Switches on several Hyper-V by using PowerShell. This topic aims to show you how to deploy VM Switches and virtual network adapters by using PowerShell. In this way you will be able to make a standard script to configure your Hyper-V hosts.

The hyperconverged infrastructure appliance market (HCIA) is growing fast and hardware competitors are using Dell, HP, SuperMicro and other servers and not Cisco’s UCS hardware. EMC only covers a portion of the market so Cisco should address the rest in order to both preserve its current UCS market share and grow it further.

During 2015 Backblaze data centre has expanded from 39’690 hard drives in 882 Backblaze Storage Pods to 56’224 drives in 1’249 Pods, which makes about 65 Petabytes of additional space.