Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware in 2022 has led to significant changes in the virtualization vendor’s licensing policy.

Migrating your VMs from one hypervisor to another may be a bit of a challenge if you don’t have some decent virtual machine converter at hand. Different hypervisors have their own proprietary VM formats: VMDK, VHD and VHDX, QCOW, you name it. The problem is that one VM format can be not supported on other platforms. In this case, a V2V converter is a must-have. Now, the question arises: which converter should I choose?

For that matter, I’ll create a file server of two types: “File server for general use” and Scale-Out File Server. For the latter, I’ll have two scenarios: VMs running and off. After that, I’m gonna evaluate the deduplication ratio using a free tool – StarWind Deduplication Analyzer. And finally, run data deduplication using the Windows Server 2016 Data Deduplication feature. We also need our storage shared, so for this purpose, I’ve decided on StarWind Virtual SAN Free.

Converged infrastructure (CI) simplifies IT with pre-configured systems, while hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) optimizes resource utilization through a unified software-defined approach. Still unsure what to choose?

Every company faces the challenge of managing data, but have you considered the cost of losing it? Embrace the 3-2-1 Backup Rule – a foundation for robust data protection.

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?

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