Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

As many admins of virtual infrastructures know, for the first time ever, VMware vSphere 6.5 received the long awaited encryption feature of both virtual disks content and vMotion hot migrations. The VMs encryption works based on AES-NI algorithm, and the key management is carried out based on KMIP 1.1 standard. When I/O operation comes to the disk of the virtual machine, it is immediately encrypted on-the-fly, which provides complete security against data security attack.

A Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO) is an office located in a different site or a remote geographical area from another office (usually the headquarter or the main office). Several organizations have one (or more) main office, as well as remote offices in another city, country or continent. Many organizations today have in each remote office some local IT infrastructure, usually for data locality, but also for service local services.

The Installation of ESXi 6.5 did not change much since previous release. After you’re download your installation ISO, you need to burn it to a CD-ROM in order to proceed with installation. Know that there is a way to install ESXi from USB stick too. And in this post we will prepare one. You as an administrator or consultant have to have your toolkit with the latest ESXi installer ready in your pocket, so today we’ll show one of the methods to create an ESXi 6.5 installation USB under two minutes. While this method of creation of USB media is quick and it is done under two minutes, it is not always obvious to deal with hardware compatibility and drivers and firmware (combination of those two) for latest vSphere 6.5. At the end of the post we’ll show you few ways how to deal with that.

Microsoft recently announced new features and updated capabilities within Azure Storage. Some of the new features are Larger blobs, incremental copy, new API capabilities and an updated version for the Storage Emulator.

Capacity planning is one of the tasks that every IT organization need to do, but most do very poorly. This is not out of bad will or lack of skills. Most often, it is because they lack a good way of dealing with all the changes, past, present and future. Most of them are also done reactively. Statistics may be pulled from vCenter and put into word or excel where graphs of past data points from a historical trend. This is then used to predict the future growth and based there of cluster sizing and purchasing decisions are made. Alternatively, the all too familiar, “we are out of resources. Hurry we need to buy more”, scenario comes into play. None of these capacity technics are very good. There is most properly a need to do things smarter.

Picture this – you are a systems administrator working at a major banking institution. The security team walks into your office and lets you know that a major update needs to be applied to all of the servers within the institution – not a problem for most organizations, but in the case of a bank, you could have hundreds if not thousands of remote and branch offices.  Sure, we can write scripts to copy out the update files and even execute them remotely from our head office – but the problem most ROBO scenarios are ever-changing – with new offices being created and others closing down all the time.  Keeping track of server names, IP schemes, etc. can be quite a time-consuming process.  Naturally, we want the same updates, patches, and fixes to be deployed everywhere, in the same manner, in order to provide consistency – so having this up to date list available when we need it is key to driving success within our environment.

Microsoft will be “guiding” new customers to use the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program to acquire any of the Azure subscriptions. Even though you won’t see the pay-as-you-go option from Microsoft, don’t panic, there’s an explanation.

We are in 2017 now, and it’s about fourth month since Windows Server 2016 has been RTMed in September 2016. By now, everyone probably heard about one of the big new features of Windows Server 2016 – Nano Server, new installation option which you can’t select during setup 🙂 . But I think there is still a lot of “why” and “how” questions around Nano Server. In this blog post, I will try to provide a bit of a history and compare Nano Server with other installation types.

I’ve been using VMWare’s VPID (Virtual Port ID) technology for some time now both in work and in the home lab but I was curious to see just how VMWare handled a NIC going down and then coming back up and it turned out to be a lot more powerful and smooth than I first thought.