Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

There’s a common opinion that the performance in general and IOPS-intensive performance like NVMe over Fabrics is usually lower in virtualized environments due to the hypervisor overhead. Therefore, I’ve decided to run a series of tests to prove or knock down this belief. For this purpose, I’ll have three scenarios for measuring the performance of NVMe over Fabrics in different infrastructures: fist – on a bare metal configuration, second – with Microsoft Hyper-V deployed on the client server, and finally, with ESXi 6.5.

Despite I have mentioned in my previous article that setting up an integration between K2 blackpearl and SharePoint online is rather “a piece of cake” level of complexity compared to manual AAD integration set up the process, I’ve decided to write this article and describe this process from start to finish. Why? Because it is one thing to say that entire process boils down to adding K2 for SharePoint App to your SharePoint Online site through app catalog, and another thing to set this up completely from the ground up.

One of the main objectives for an organization moving to a public cloud, in any type of shape or form, is regarding the overall performance experience: It cannot be a downgraded version of what they have with their on-premises services. Microsoft is well aware of that, therefore created some time back the possibility to use private connections from your datacenter to MS Azure’s datacenters in order to guarantee this performance.

Previously, we went through the Storage Spaces configuration journey. The latest step was the creation of the storage pool and the virtual disk. Today I would like to proceed from that point on and create Highly Available (HA) devices with VSAN from StarWind on Storage Spaces as an underlying storage. The main goal of this post is to run the performance tests of StarWind Highly Available (HA) devices located on Storage Spaces created in different ways (Simple and Mirror). StarWind HA devices will be mirrored between two hosts via a 40Gbps synchronization channel.

Microsoft has introduced Azure Cloud Shell, a new way of managing resources from the Azure Portal. Within a browser, you can use Bash to troubleshoot and automate your most common management tasks. Support for Windows PowerShell is expected soon. Azure Cloud Shell will help you to store your favorite scripts in the Cloud.

VMware ESXi is the industry-leading hypervisor that is installed directly on a physical server. It is a reliable and secure solution with a tiny hardware footprint. At the same time, ESXi architecture is easy in management, patching, and updating.

Recently, Mellanox has released iSER 1.0.0.1, the stable iSER driver build for ESXi. iSER is an iSCSI extension for RDMA that enables the direct data transfer out and into SCSI memory without any intermediate data copies. Here, we study the driver stability and performance to understand how the protocol streamlines ESXi environments.

As a summary, LAPS is the Local Administration Password solution from Microsoft. This software changes the local administrator password on a selection of machines on a schedule and stores that password in plain text in Active Directory. The first time I came across LAPS was when I hear about project Honolulu and I’ll admit that I hadn’t heard about it before which is something of a shame because LAPS is one of those very handy little add-ins that Microsoft should be offering as part of the core AD experience. For those who haven’t come across LAPS before, LAPS is a handy tool for scenarios where you need to change or set the local admin password to something random because you need to give out that password.

There’s, probably, no IT administrator who hasn’t heard of SMB3 (Server Message Block). is an application-layer network protocol, developed by Microsoft mostly to provide shared access to the files, and allowing communication between nodes. SMB has been designed as a tool for the creation of a DOS-based network file system, but Microsoft took the initiative and renamed SMB into CIFS later on (Common Internet File System) and continued further developing it. The second version – SMB 2.0, has been introduced in Windows Vista with a wide range of new features, thus it became clear that Microsoft was working hard to improve this protocol.

Many years ago, I wrote a white paper on how to configure a VEEAM Off-host backup proxy server for backing up a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster that uses a hardware VSS provider with VEEAM Backup & Replication 7.0.  It has aged well and you can still use it as a guide to set it all up. But in this article, I revisit the use of a hardware VSS provider dedicated specifically to some changes in Windows Server 2016 and its use by Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5 or later. The information here is valid for any good hardware VSS provider like the one VSAN from StarWind provides (see Do I need StarWind Hardware VSS provider?)

Microsoft operating systems and server applications are becoming increasingly dependent on proper time synchronization. A skewed system clock can affect your ability to log on, can cause problems with mail flow in Exchange, and be the source of a great many difficult-to-locate problems. To compound matters, the default method of handling time synchronization within a Windows network isn’t exactly reliable or even predictable. If a Hyper-V host’s clock becomes out of sync, it usually affects all of its virtual machines, sometimes catastrophically. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much work to get everything in sync.