Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

The past month has been categorized as something of a performance and upgrades challenge as one of the constant calls I hear is “application X is going to slow”, of course, a month ago it was fine but today it isn’t and normally this is just down to increasing load. One of the common fixes for increasing load is to add more vCPU and RAM but often that can cause its own set of problems especially when NUMA boundaries are crossed and when vCPU contention pushes things a little too far.

It is not new that VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is a very popular option, especially for small businesses which can save money on an additional Windows Server license. It is a prepackaged and preconfigured virtual appliance with PostgreSQL database, vCenter server 6.5 components and also (in case you deploy “all-in-one” VM) Platform services Controller that contain all of the necessary services for running vCenter Server such as vCenter Single Sign-On, License service, and VMware Certificate Authority.

Previously, we discussed how data might be classified and segregated so that policies could be developed to place data on infrastructure in a deliberative manner – that is,  in a way that optimizes data access, storage resources and services, and storage costs over the useful life of the data itself.  From the standpoint of cognitive data management, data management policies constitute the instructions or programs that the cognitive engine processes to place and move data on and within infrastructure over time.

In my previous blog post, I covered SharePoint 2016 installation process, my next logical step after that was to configure SharePoint app catalog so that I can add K2 for SharePoint app and as I covered this process earlier on my personal blog, I expected this to be a small task. Indeed, I had created it following steps from my old blog post in just minutes, but, alas, I run into loads of warnings while running K2 for SharePoint AppDeployment.exe. I sorted most of them but after seeing extra warnings telling me that additional configuration is required just because I’m using HTTP instead of HTTPS I decided that it is better to re-create my app catalog using HTTPS.

In the previous blog, we established that there is a growing need to focus on Capacity Utilization Efficiency in order to “bend the cost curve” in storage.  Just balancing data placement across repositories (Capacity Allocation Efficiency) is insufficient to cope with the impact of data growth and generally poor management.  Only by placing data on infrastructure in a deliberative manner that optimizes data access and storage services and costs, can IT pros possibly cope with the coming data deluge anticipated by industry analysts.

Microsoft has just released to the public, and with a stable version (preview was announced in September 2016), Azure Monitor. This platform represents a set of features and capabilities within Azure to provide detail logs, metrics and diagnostic about the workloads in the Microsoft public cloud.

VMware has recently released an update to its main platform for enterprise virtual and physical desktops infrastructure management – VMware Horizon 7.1. More than six months have passed since the release of the previous Horizon 7.0.2 version, and a whole year since the release of the major Horizon 7.

Design a ROBO scenario must match finally the reality of the customers’ needs, its constraints but also the type of workload and the possible availability solutions of them.

Working with vRops over the last years has taught me one thing. The development of vRops goes so fast. Sometimes so fast that you do not realize when or what has changed. However, there are many “hidden” gems in vRops, which will make you and the product shine even more. So come along, as I will show you my top ten hidden gems of vRops…