Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Migrating sites to the cloud can be quite troublesome. For such cases, Microsoft introduced the Windows Site Migration Tool. This is a program that can collect the necessary information about a website hosted on IIS, analyze it, and then automatically transfer all settings, files, and even the database directly to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Make sure that the migration of the sites is really easy and can be completed within a few minutes!

Some time ago, I wrote an article about backup storage media. Today, I’d like to talk about secondary storage.

Before I move on, I want to clarify what I mean by “secondary storage” here, just to make sure that we are on the same page. Secondary storage is the storage where the actively used data resides. It can be both some local storage like SAN or NAS, or some public cloud hot tier. Well, it’s absolutely true that you can use disk arrays too, but let’s think of them today just as NAS-like servers packed with many disks, ok? That’s entirely up to you “which side you are on”, and there’s no “one-size-fits-all” solution. NAS, SAN, and public cloud storage… Whatever secondary storage you choose, it has own pros and cons. I discuss them in this article.

The latest technology allows moving as separate databases and log files and the entire system. In this context, speed, ease, and lack of downtime are critical factors for the success of this process. How to ensure them and not to get lost in a variety of options for migrating SQL Server databases to Azure?

StarWind & VMware vSphere users get unrestricted VSAN from StarWind features, storage capacity, and outstanding cost-efficiency. Using StarWind VSAN, the process of deploying VMs, providing fault-tolerant storage, connecting it to hypervisor, and creating highly available VMs becomes a “piece o’ cake!”. But what about software RAID configuration? How not to get lost in a variety of choices between the different RAID levels?

Sometimes, you badly need to provide your VMware VMs with more RAM or vCPUs without shutting them down. True, there’s a trick allowing you to do that – CPU Hot-Plug and Memory Hot-Add. In this article, I’ll discuss both these features and how to use them in different environments.

Why do I write an article about Hot-Plug and Hot-Add in 2018 even though they were introduced back in ESXi 4.0? You see, there are very few in-depth studies of how Hot-Add and Hot-Plug work in different environments for some reasons. Sure, you can find a bunch of good articles about how you enable those features, why you need them, and when you may just want to leave them disabled (yes, they are disabled by default). There were some studies held for Windows guest OS family, but there is very few known about how Hot-Add/Hot-Plug work in Linux. Well, I hope to fill that gap with this article.

Everyone knows that modern operating systems write data into the empty blocks but not in the ones that are just marked as deleted. VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1, TRIM/UNMAP feature to be exact, will help you to easily restore data that marked as deleted. For space-saving concerns, vSAN allows creating thin provisioned disks that grow gradually as they are filled with data.

A Kemp LoadMaster appliance is a critical service for load balancing and application content delivery. Thanks to flexible deployment options for a wide range of hypervisors and cloud platforms, Kemp LoadMaster allows you to distribute user traffic and improve application performance in private and hybrid cloud systems intelligently and efficiently. At the same time, usually Kemp is in front of critical services such as E-mail, web applications, SharePoint and if you lose it, you’ll get service outage. Deploying an HA cluster will solve this problem and provide a high availability, especially for a physical appliance!

If you are new to VMware or just starting out in the tech, you may feel a bit confused about products naming. Well, at least I was. There are tons of products in the suite so many have a hard time grasping how all those things come together. For instance, it may be hard for a beginner to tell apart ESXi and vSphere. What should you do? Well, nothing special, you know. Google. Ask fellow admins. Look through forums. Read books. Well, my post is not here to bring you from the very beginning to finish. It’s rather a long process, and you need to pay your dues sometimes. Honestly, I got some knowledge only through fixing things that I had messed up. This post covers some questions that popped out in my head when I was only starting. And, my case is not unique. So, let’s start with VMware!

Migration of virtual machines is an important feature of virtualization technology that allows applications to move transparently along with their runtime environments between physical machines. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) allows the migration of one or multiple on-premises virtual machines to AWS in an easy way from a single pane of glass. Plan, automate, and track step-by-step replication of running server volumes with just one tool — the AWS console!

From day to day, admins troubleshoot issues remotely. And, pretty often, they cannot count on another guy who helps them to enable Remote Desktop (RD) on the remote host. There may also be the case when you loose the access to RD on another computer for some reason, and there’s no one in the remote office who can help you. Whatever, I hope you got the point. What do you need to do? Sure, you can just ask a fellow admin to enable RD on the remote host and wait a bit, but what if that’s something really urgent and you are to fix that issue in the middle of the night? Let’s think through what you can do in that case.