Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

As you remember from my previous article, I have been interested in testing the performance levels of two virtual SAN configurations from different vendors. I got my results, but this experience prompted me to continue. Here, I’ve chosen to try another configuration for performance comparison, albeit with only a slightly different list of participants.

Since no one needs an introduction from VMware vSAN, I’d like to say a few words about its companion – Ceph. Basically, it is an object-based software storage platform. I know that doesn’t sound epic at all, but Ceph is also completely fault-tolerant, uses off-the-shelf hardware, and is extremely scalable. The most interesting thing is that some Ceph releases apply erasure-coded data pools so that it would be a less resource-hungry solution than traditional replicated pools. In practice, that means the following: when you store an object in a Ceph storage cluster, the algorithm divides this object into data and coding chunks, stored in different OSDs (that way, the system could lose an OSD without actually losing the data).

Now, that’s when I thought that theoretically, Ceph could make a good virtualization platform (proper configuration, of course), so I had to see whether it would be justified in terms of time and resources spent. Naturally, I hardly could have done it without a credible comparison, hence VMware vSAN (with a similar configuration, of course, otherwise it would make no sense).

So, shall we?

It’s wrong to think that nothing can hijack your data while you migrate it between your hosts across hybrid environments and public clouds. One may never be too sure in securing sensitive traffic at network endpoints is necessary at all times. That’s why you shouldn’t overlook encrypted vMotion and use its great capabilities that are already there, in vSphere 7.

Veritas is a great offer for storing Office 365 data without any hard commitment. It doesn’t need any backup infrastructure since it comes as software-as-a-service (SaaS). In addition, your data will be encrypted, pursuant to GDPR rules, while it’s stored at the Veritas Datacenter in Denmark. Finally, the price for unlimited storage here is as good as it gets.

Keeping up with priorities, subscriptions, resource groups, and other policies in a hyper-converged environment can be quite challenging. Azure Policy helps receive an aggregated view of your environment via a compliance dashboard. It simplifies enforcing standards and allows you to effortlessly and minutely address any issue.

VMware introduced quite a good chunk of innovations this time: performance has been improved dramatically, memory pre-copy technology completely re-architected. But the true novelty lies in new Enhanced vMotion Capabilities (EVC) for GPU, making it a real powerhouse for intense workloads (graphic software, ML/DL-workloads, etc.)

With cybersecurity nowadays, you can never be too sure. And having to maintain it at scale can prove quite straining. Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native software imbued with AI functions, can help simplify that process for you. Have a birds-eye view of your entire HCI via a convenient dashboard and benefit from Microsoft’s years of cyber intelligence experience.

We’ve saved you a lot of time, effort, and frustration by compiling all the essential steps to take if you want to upgrade from Horizon series 7.x to Horizon 2006. The article covers the compatibility matrix, which features to uninstall before proceeding with the upgrade, what backup precautions to perform, and all the other good stuff.

Among other exciting things, VMworld 2020 also presented project Monterey, which is to be based on a new type of network interface controller (NIC) — SmartNIC. This new NIC rendition will include DPU (data processing unit) capabilities by using different approaches. The idea is to make more server resources available by offloading a set of workloads onto SmartNIC.

Storage performance testing isn’t something one should take lightly, and VMware admins know this like any other. There are way too many tools to choose from, and you have no guarantee that you will get what you need. Or, at least, it used to be so, until VMware has released a new tool, Storage Performance Tester.

Dell markets its EMC OpenManage extension for Windows Admin Center as a unified solution for ensuring Azure Stack HCI updates and compliance. Unfortunately, that is not the case since Dell’s extension is not in line with the current Azure hardware and software compliance matrix, and it’s not in tune with the latest WAC versions.