Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Microsoft continues to invest and expand its PowerShell Scripting Environment but sometimes it is necessary to use a graphical interface in order to manage systems. This is the reason why Microsoft also develops a new management tool called “Project Honolulu”. Honolulu is the modern evolution of traditional MMC, first introduced in 2000. Now, it’s time to update our management tools! In this article, I will describe how to download and install Honolulu.

Since some time, VMware provides PowerCLI which is a set of modules for VMware vSphere. Except if you were in a cave last 10 years, you should know that PowerShell is a powerful scripting language. Initially, PowerShell enabled to manage only Windows Workstation or Server, but since sometimes, a lot of vendors make their own modules to manage their solutions (such as Veeam, VMware and so on). Moreover, PowerShell is available on Linux. For my job, I always use PowerShell. I’m a lazy guy, and if I have to make something two times, I make a script. This is the same thing for VMware vSphere. In this topic, we’ll see how to connect to vCenter and some commands to start.

There have been a lot of high profile security breaches this year, the highest profile has to be that of Equifax as that is a breach which has the potential to run and run for some time to come. Deloitte also got breached and alongside those large companies which should have known better, there have been various others impacting systems such as Disqus. Of course, once it was made clear how the breach occurred, a lot was said about how bad it is that the breaches accorded and how it should never have happened and this is quite valid from a technical standpoint but, the reasons that these security issues were allowed to exist go far beyond the technical and into the realm of human factors.

When Availability Groups were introduced in SQL Server 2012, they were only available in Enterprise Edition. This made it challenging to move from Database Mirroring to Availability Groups, especially if you’re running Standard Edition.  To upgrade and migrate from Database Mirroring in Standard Edition, you either choose to upgrade to a more expensive Enterprise Edition license and implement Availability Groups or stick with Database Mirroring and hope that everything works despite being deprecated.

When it comes time for your vSphere upgrade there are many different approaches to how you perform the upgrades on your ESXi hosts.   An administrator who looks after a small cluster may update one way, whereas an administrator who looks after an enterprise with 1000s of hosts may opt to go another.  Also, depending on how your environment is deployed you might want to choose one method over another.  Factors such as a whether or not your hosts are managed by a vCenter server, whether or not they are members of a cluster – these things all impact the methods in which you chose to update to the latest version of ESXi.  Certainly, some methods are much more simplistic than others to perform, some offer more advantages when upgrading at scale, and some are more prone to user error – let’s take a look at each method of upgrading our hosts below and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each…

One of the best freeware applications which gather a lot of information about VMware vSphere id definitely RVTools utility. Today we’ll have a look at some features which are the most useful ones for IT admins. RVTools is a Windows .NET 4.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual environments. So, before you download and install the tool, you’ll need to check if your Windows system has at least .NET 4.0 installed.

Plenty of articles have been released about Storage Spaces and everything around this topic. However, I would like to absorb all actual information and lead you through the journey of configuring Storage Spaces on a Standalone host. The main goal of the article is to show a Multi-Resilient Volume configuration process. In order to use Storage Spaces, we need to have faster (NVMe, SSD) and slower (HDD) devices. So, we have a set of NVMe devices along with SAS HDD or SATA HDD, and we should create performance and capacity tier respectively.

Howdy, folks! I would like to start my tale with a little backstory regarding usefulness which the “maintenance mode” brings to us. And in order to do that, I’ll start from the times when updates have led to the downtime for production. That’s not a secret for anyone that any production environment sometimes needs to be maintained. It could either be a software update or a hardware reconfiguration. To do this, the administrator should stop the production server for a certain period of time, and this may affect the reliability of the production environment. For example, the fault tolerance level can be decreased, as well as the performance. This is especially critical for small infrastructures which consist of 2 nodes.

With Windows Server 2012 and above, Standard Edition now has full support for clustering, not just simple 2-node active/passive clusters, but fully configured clustering support.  Before Windows Server 2012, only Windows Server Enterprise Edition could support Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). Starting from Windows Server 2012, clustering got a huge licensing cost reduction.

Ever since Windows Server 2012 we have SMB Direct capabilities in the OS and Windows Server 2012 R2 added more use cases such as live migration for example. In Windows Server 2016, even more, workloads leverage SMB Direct, such as S2D and Storage Replication. SMB Direct leverages the RDMA capabilities of a NIC which delivers high throughput at low latency combined with CPU offloading to the NIC. The latter save CPU cycles for the other workloads on the hosts such as virtual machines.