Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Microsoft Flow is a handy tool to create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services. It allows you to collect data, sync files, and automate all that boring jobs related to, let’s say, sending emails once a tweet with a buzzword is posted. Find out how to set Microsoft Flow in the full article by Florent Appointaire.

Let’s be honest, any system administrator may face the need of hot-adding the network interfaces to the guest VMs in his Microsoft Hyper-V environment one day. And that’s no problem as Windows Server 2016 brought in a whole set of useful features, one of which is the ability to add and remove network adapters on the running VMs. Moreover, you can do that in two ways – GUI, if you’re looking for a straightforward process and PowerShell if you are a fan of automation.

Today, I’ll talk about a thing that any sysadmin running Hyper-V VMs does (or still dreams about) while managing infrastructure resources: hot modifying assigned to VM memory amount. I’ll discuss not only the feature itself but also how it works on different OS and its impact on the environment stability.

All of us keep an eye on resource consumption within our environments. If a VM needs extra RAM to have the job done, we provide it with some, right? And, we usually run many VMs on our servers each with own purpose and configuration. That’s, actually, why changing the amount of assigned to a VM memory without rebooting it may come in handy. Also, many guys run some parts of their environments on Windows while having other parts run on something from Linux family. Looks pretty hectic in terms of management, doesn’t it?

These days, businesses do not stick to one location anymore. Such trend pushes companies to build stretched clusters, IT infrastructures spanned across several locations. Such approach enables them to implement better disaster recovery strategies and achieve higher performance. To build such environments, you need fast connection and the solution to use resources of all your remote sites just as they were located in one place. Here, VSAN from StarWind comes into play – the solution for building high performing active-active replicated shared storage.

One day, any virtual infrastructure needs to be updated. That may be just due to admin’s wish to keep up with modern trends or the need for some cool features that are brought to life with the latest updates. And, speaking of updates, VMware has recently released their vSphere 6.5 U2. Find out more details about it in this document:

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-vsphere-feature-comparison-datasheet.pdf

So, being a VMware fan, I decided to update my vSphere 6.5 and describe the entire update process from its planning through the installation itself.

In today’s topic, I’d like to talk about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. But not about the harm they cause, this has been covered widely in numerous articles, but how Microsoft patches intended to protect you from the vulnerabilities, affect (if they do) the hardware performance. Before we take a deep dive into the tests and numbers, let me tell a few words about Meltdown and Spectre and outline the testing scope to make sure we speak one language.

Find out from the StarWind blog article how to perform Check Disk on Cluster Shared Volume on StarWind VSAN with Failover Cluster ManagerSometimes, you can see an error in Failover Cluster Manager as “Chkdsk scan needed on volume”. It might happen due to some potential problems on a disk. To fix the issue, the system advices you to run a Chkdsk which is the well-known command for every system administrator.

There are various tricks and hints we all use to make our daily system administration routines easier. One of them is virtual machine cloning provided by VMware vCenter Server. Great and simple thing allowing you to deploy many identical virtual machines to a group – no need to repeat the same process all over again. This is usually done in vCenter but there are several other ways you can go if it becomes unavailable.

Many of us view Gitlab as something that only developers may use. Indeed, these guys love it, but are they the only ones who may find it handy? That’s time to dispel that myth! Gitlab is more than the cool repository for scripts of any size and shape. It is a feature-rich solution, so that won’t be fair to leave that thing on the table.

We all know what backup window really is, right? It’s an extremely short period of time that you are supposed to fit all your backup processes in somehow. Still, this challenge looks not that hard to accomplish as long as you are using that time wisely. That’s, actually, what Veeam Backup & Replication backup job chaining is intended for!