Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Microsoft keeps going big on offering VMware integration, we’ve mentioned in the past that they’ve released a freeware tool to backup VMware virtual machines into Azure: Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS). And now they keep insisting on taking over Enterprise VMware customers into Azure, or at least their Site Recovery solution: Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware.

This article is intended to introduce you to the main concepts and features of Fibre Channel (FC), the high-speed network technology and a relevant family of standards (protocols) for storage networking that was standardized in 1994.

In Part II we will review the remaining improvements in vSphere Availability and Resource Management brought by vSphere 6.5.

A number of improvements that have been introduced in vSphere HA and DRS in the last several years are impressive. vSphere 6.5 continues this tradition by bringing new features into HA Admission Control, by adding flexibility with HA Orchestrated Restart and by enabling DRS to make more intelligent balancing. I will be trying a new format today. First, I will be explaining the challenges you might have had in previous vSphere releases and then I will show you how the new vSphere 6.5 HA & DRS features address those challenges.

The network component and the troubleshooting that sometimes we need to do represents a big factor on all cloud customers, not matter if you are using Azure, AWS, Office 365 or any other. If you don’t have control over the network and/or you are not capable of identifying issues root causes, then there’s most likely the cloud experience it’s not going to be a good one. Microsoft has that clear and is now offering a new tool to assist customers: Azure Network Watcher.

In this article, we will not cover all the Exchange Management cmdlets but I will describe several examples to guide you in the right direction. In all Exchange Server edition, a lot of settings are configured automatically by the Exchange installation. So it is a good idea to explore all the settings individually to become familiar with your Exchange Server.

Microsoft announced the release of VMM SDN Express for System Center Virtual Machines Manager 2016 to simplify their Software-Defined Networking (SDNv2) deployment infrastructure. In short, VMM SDN Express is basically a VMM PowerShell script and parameter file that help you to deploy a production-ready Software-Defined Networking on top of Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition and SCVMM 2016, and without you having to move through multiple wizards or having to wait for a long time.

In the previous topic, we have seen how to install and update Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5. In this topic, we will prepare the environment. We will connect to vCenter to be able to backup virtual machines and we will add a backup repository. In my lab environment, I have deployed a vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 (VCSA). The VCSA FQDN is admin.vsphere.lab.

In the previous post, we have explained and described business requirements and constraints in order to support design and implementation decisions suited for mission-critical applications, considering also how risk can affect design decisions.