Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Thanks to the previous part, we have SQL Server 2016 installed and configured. Before running the SCCM installation process, let’s remember the architecture we are implementing.

The reason for writing this post was a recent case from one of our customers, who ran into an issue when their SAN switch failed. The problem was that their VMs were generating an enormous amount of errors that were caused by the switching of active paths at the time of failover.

On November 17th  2016, Microsoft SCCM Team has released version 1610 for the Current Branch (CB) of System Center Configuration Manager that includes some great new features and product enhancements. SCCM 1610 includes lots of new features and enhancements in Windows 10 and Office 365 management, application management, end user experience, client management and also includes new functionality in hybrid mode with Microsoft Intune.

We’ve talked before in this blog about Microsoft Project Olympus and the Open Compute Project (OCP): “Microsoft, the Open Source Cloud Hardware and Why is it Important to You”. This time, Microsoft is expanding the Olympus ideal by adding NVIDIA support with their GPU capabilities into their Open Source Hardware.

As most of you are probably aware, Gitlab is, in part, a source code hosting repository which suffered something of a major outage just a few weeks ago. Unusually, they posted a very full and frank report on what actually happened. It’s very rare for a company to do this and even rarer for it to be made public, I wish more companies would do this, even if it was just an internal review with the blame put on the process, it would at least highlight where the weaknesses are in the infrastructure.

Recently there was an article on StarWind Blog dedicated to Exchange 2016 installation written by Nicolas Prigent, so I decided that some folks might want to get something similar for SharePoint 2016, so here you are. Disclaimer: I did not touch on scripting SharePoint installation with PowerShell or any other advanced stuff, but I promise that you’ll find some interesting details beyond of “how do I click my way through setup wizard” information.

There are lots of great materials on optimization of virtualized environments that I think many of you will enjoy reading about. Such topics are all over the IT community and they cover a wide range of the technical questions. This article will focus on the matter which is not quite clear yet, especially when it comes from theory to practice. It’s about Windows Disk write cache feature and its implications for data consistency and performance of the virtual hard drives.

In the previous topics, we have installed and updated Veeam B&R 9.5. Then we have connected Veeam to vCenter 6.5 to get visibility on VMware VM and backup them. To finish, we have added a backup repository to store backup files. Now we can backup a virtual machine. Once we have some restore points, we can also recover the VM.

There has certainly been no lack of surprises coming from Redmond over the past year or so. As soon as Satya Nadella took the reins of Microsoft it has seemed like a barrage of Microsoft news hitting the wires – but this news does not fall within the traditional line of Microsoft. Open sourcing .net, open sourcing PowerShell, and finally, providing a means to run MS SQL Server on Linux. Don’t get me wrong – this is great news for the IT world. Cross compatibility, platform-independent – these words are words that excite me. Microsoft has taken notice of the dominance of the cloud, more so, the dominance of Linux within the cloud. Certainly, releasing the ability to take a Linux instance within the cloud and run our SQL Server on it is a step in the right direction – for Microsoft, and for us as IT professionals. Just like PowerShell, the MS SQL Linux deployment supports a limited number of distributions – more specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Ubuntu Server 16.04.