Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

This is a short overview of Microsoft Resilient File System, or ReFS. It introduces the subject and gives a short insight into its main characteristics and theoretical use. It is a part of a series of posts dedicated to ReFS and is, basically, an introduction to the practical posts. All the experiments that show how ReFS really performs, are also listed in the blog. ReFS seems to be a great replacement for the NTFS and its resilience is most convenient for cases, when data loss is critically unacceptable. The file system cooperates with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct in order to perform automatic corruption repairs, without any attention of the user.

Personally, I am getting rather tired of the dismissive tone adopted by virtualization and cloud vendors when you raise the issue of disaster recovery.  We previously discussed the limited scope of virtual systems clustering and failover:  active-passive and active-active server clusters with data mirroring is generally inadequate for recovery from interruption events that have a footprint larger than a given equipment rack or subnetwork.  Extending mirroring and cluster failover over distances greater than 80 kilometers is a dicey strategy, especially given the impact of latency and jitter on data transport over WAN links, which can create data deltas that can prevent successful application or database recovery altogether.

Snapshots in VMware vSphere often cause various problems with configurations and performance, unless they are properly used – for live backup of virtual machines and temporary keeping VM configuration before the update. However, using them in large infrastructures is unavoidable. At some point you may need to delete/consolidate virtual machine snapshots (Delete All button in Snapshot Manager), which is quite time-consuming and demanding in terms of storage performance. Thus it would be a good thing to know in advance how much time it takes.

According to IDC quarterly report, EMC’s Data Domain leads in the purpose-built backup appliance market.

In part three of this multi-part blog series, we covered how to configure OMS to collect data through integration with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), and through direct connections to individual servers. We also covered how Microsoft Operations Management Suite uses Solutions to deliver insights into your log data by providing a cost-effective, all-in-one cloud management solution so you can better protect guest workloads in Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMWare, and Open Stack.

In part two of this multi part blog series, we covered how to configure OMS to collect data through integration with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), and through direct connections to individual servers. We also covered how Microsoft Operations Management Suite uses Solutions to deliver insights into your log data by providing a cost-effective, all-in-one cloud management solution so you can better protect guest workloads in Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMWare, and Open Stack

The need or perceived need for hard CPU processor affinity stems from a desire to offer the best possible guaranteed performance.  The use cases for this do exist but the problems they try to solve or the needs they try to meet might be better served by a different design or architecture such as dedicated hardware. This is especially true when this requirement is limited to a single or only a few virtual machines needing lots of resources and high performance that are mixed into an environment where maximum density is a requirement. In such cases, the loss of flexibility by the Hyper-V CPU scheduler in regards to selecting where to source the time slices of CPU cycles is detrimental. The high performance requirements of such VMs also means turning of NUMA spanning. Combining processor affinity and high performance with maximum virtual machine density is a complex order to fulfill, no matter what.

New, significantly improved Raspberry Pi 3 has been released this month. Improvements include a quad-core 64-bit ARM processor, an upgraded graphic processor, and a built-in wireless adapter. In order to meet the storage needs Western Digital has issued a new specialized low-profile hard drive called PiDrive.

In part one of this multi-part blog series, we covered how to establish a Microsoft Operations Management Suite environment; in the second part, Part II, we will discuss how to get started with Microsoft Operations Management Suite and we will introduce OMS solutions. If you missed Part I, please make sure to check it here before you move on to Part II.