Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

The next version of Hyper-V which comes with Windows Server 2016, brings a new feature called Virtual Network Adapter Identification. This feature enables to specify a name when a network adapter is added to the virtual machine and to retrieve this same name inside the VM. This feature can be also managed from Virtual Machine Manager 2016. This feature is really great to automate the renaming of the virtual network adapters inside VMs. In this topic I’ll show you how it is working and how to automate the renaming of the network adapters with PowerShell.

Nano Server is a headless, remotely managed version of its server product that comes as a separate installation option in Windows Server 2016, which is in Technical Preview 5 at the moment, but is thought to represent the final feature version before RTM.

Here is an overview dedicated to disaster recovery, more specific, it’s about the DR capabilities of Microsoft Storage Replica – a new feature of Windows Server 2016. It takes a glance on the DR process itself and then brings a few details of the Storage Replica operation, its features, and peculiarities. They include zero data loss, block-level replication, simple deployment and management, guest and host, SMB3 protocol, high security, high performance, consistency groups, user delegation, network constraint, thin provisioning, etc. The post is, basically, an introduction to a series of experiments also listed on the blog. They were conducted in order to check the functionality and performance of Microsoft Storage Replica in different use cases.

This is an overview of the Server Message Block (SMB3) protocol from Microsoft. It offers a short insight into the history of SMB3 creation and development over the years (as the idea is technically around 30 years old). As of Windows Server 2012, the protocol got new features: SMB Transparent Failover, SMB Scale Out, SMB Multichannel, SMB Direct, SMB Encryption, VSS for SMB file shares, SMB Directory Leasing, SMB PowerShell. In Windows Server 2016, it also got Pre-authentication integrity and Cluster dialect fencing. The post concentrates on RDMA-capable SMB Direct and MPIO-utilizing SMB Multichannel and their benefits. Also, it is an introduction to a series of tests aimed at creating SMB 3.0 File Servers in an unusual way.

While the Windows Server 2016 “Technical Preview (TP) 5 has had the option for restoring data via System Restore protection, Microsoft did not keep this option in the final release. As such, we have only two built-in options. After spyware and malware IT administrators do have to face another threat – A Ransomware. You have to pay to recover your data that has been encrypted by malware. Clever move from the Pirate’s perspective. Indeed. Pirates are hoping that they can make some dirty money out of it. And sometimes they’re successful. You might be asking what can you do, as a system administrator, to protect yourself against ransomware?

As we know, Backblaze publishes the specifications its product – Storage Pods, and recently it has announced its sixth generation design, with the number of disks rising from 45 to 60 while reducing costs down even further.

In part two of this multi part blog series, we covered the creation and configuration of a GitHub account, to host a GitHub repository for a Quick Start template, and then we examined Visual Studio Code integration with Git and lastly we pushed commits to a remote repository on GitHub. In the final post, we will modify and deploy sample and custom template and parameter JSON files. If you missed Part I and Part II, please make sure to check them here Part I and Part II before you continue with the last part.

In part one of this multi part blog series, we explained the benefits of Azure Resource Manager and resource groups in Azure V2 versus the Service Management API in Azure V1, then we looked in depth at JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Quick Start templates. In the second part, Part II: we will create and configure a GitHub account, if you don’t already have one, to host a GitHub repository for a Quick Start template, and lastly we will examine Visual Studio Code integration with Git and push commits to a remote repository. In the final post, we will modify and deploy sample/custom template and parameter JSON files. If you missed Part I, please make sure to check it here before you continue with this post.

With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V became truly NUMA aware.  A virtual NUMA topology is presented to the guest operating system. By default, the virtual NUMA topology is optimized by matching the NUMA topology of physical host. This enables Hyper-V to get the optimal performance for virtual machines with high performance, NUMA aware workloads where large numbers of vCPUs and lots of memory come into play. A great and well known example of this is SQL Server.