Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Many of you know that VMware has a technology called vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC). It involves launch of Docker (and others) virtualized containers in small virtual machines with a lightweight operating system based on Linux distribution. This operating system is VMware Photon OS 1.0, which has been finally released just recently. This is the first release version of this operating system from VMware, but in the long view it can become the main platform for virtual appliances by replacing the everlasting SUSE Linux.

Google announced that its FASTER Cable system, an undersea fibre optic cable running from the US to Japan, is now online. This will give them up to 10 terabytes per second (about 1/6 of the cable’s total bandwidth). This is claimed to be the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built.

With Windows Server 2016 we have gained some very welcome capabilities to do cost effective VDI deployments using all in box technologies. The main areas of improvement are in storage, RemoteFX and with Discrete Device Assignment for hardware pass-through to the VM. Let’s take a look at what’s possible now and think out loud on what solutions are possible as well as their benefits and drawbacks.

Docker Datacenter on Azure and AWS has been announced on Tuesday 21st, June 2016 at the DockerCon.

Windows Server development projects usually go through a common sequence of stages with a corresponding set of artifacts for the resulting app or service, and for each of them there is a standard set of best practices:

ReFS (Resilient File System – is a Microsoft file system, which ensures data integrity by means of resiliency to corruption (irrespective of software or hardware failures), increases data availability and scales to large data sets across various workloads. Its data protection feature is represented by the FileIntegrity option, which is responsible for file scanning and repair processes.

Microsoft Windows Multipoint Server function is a function which allows you to use a shared resource technology from Microsoft to share compute. Share desktop. This is very convenient for example in environments like educational or training environments which can benefit from a single server in order to use a remote desktop experience.

The works of Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, have helped Microsoft to patch a significant security issue in its implementation of the NetBIOS protocol that affected all Windows existing versions. It was found out that the attacker can exploit this vulnerability to pass as a WPAD or ISATAP server and redirect all the victim’s network traffic through a point controlled by the attacker. Network traffic here means not just Web HTTP and HTTPS, but also OS updates, software upgrades, Certificate Revocation List updates via Microsoft’s Crypto API, and other OS maintenance operations.

The QoS policy was a feature included in Windows Server 2012 R2 that enabled to set a minimum and a maximum IOPS on a VHD(X). These policies were not centralized and you had to set the QoS policy on each VHD(X) independently. In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has improved this feature because the policy can now be stored in the cluster database. You can create a policy based on a minimum / maximum IOPS and/or a bandwidth. This policy can be applied to a VHD(X) (Dedicated Policy Type) or to a set of VHD(X) (Aggregated policy Type).