Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Windows Admin Center (WAC) simplifies Windows server management with user-friendly web tools and seamless Azure integration.

As time goes on, fewer and fewer people tend to rely on cumbersome SANs. It doesn’t mean that they have become obsolete; it’s just that many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) simply don’t require all the broad specter of services and resources that a storage area network system can offer. That makes perfect sense: if you can farewell with a less complicated and resource-hungry configuration – why pay more? Virtual SANs have become the newfound Holy Grail of small infrastructures. And why not? They offer software-defined storage solutions that support HCI systems and leave external shared storage out of the picture. An introduction of virtual SAN solutions to the market has changed a lot, opening the way for simple storage configurations that can provide maximum possible performance with minimum possible resources required, respectively. Since the market has emerged, it didn’t take long to recognize the leaders, which are StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) and VMware virtual SAN (vSAN). All else being equal, neither is considered better or worse. However, each IT environment is, in a way, unique. I don’t need to tell you about the multitude of configurations out there. So, with the diversity of HCI systems and hardware requirements in mind, this begets a question: are these solutions really giving away an equal performance, all things considered?

With the surge in remote work, securing access to corporate resources is crucial. Explore the enhanced compatibility, new features, and security measures that make VMware Unified Access Gateway (UAG) a top choice for remote access management.

Step-by-step instructions on replacing a failed drive in S2D without breaking your cluster or data integrity.

  Before starting to talk about new features and improvements, I suggest we take a little trip down memory lane.

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?