Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

In my today’s topic, I discuss why PowerShell behaves like that. Specifically, I shed light on why you cannot run scripts or access a computer on a different domain. Also, I’ll take a closer look at how some cmdlets work.

You’re on VMWare ESX 5.5, 6 or 6.5 and you want to migrate to Azure? Don’t worry, it’s pretty simple now, just follow this article. To start, you must run one of the following VMWare version, supported by Microsoft, 5.5, 6.0 or 6.5. After that, you need an Azure subscription to be able to migrate to Azure.

This blog article discusses Access Rights feature and its implementation in VSAN from StarWind environment. Access Rights allows you to segregate the storage between multiple clusters or hypervisors. You can configure the feature with StarWind Management Console, and, in this article, I’ll teach you how that can be done.

Windows Server 2019 should be available in barely two months. So, first migration will start shortly after. From experience, I know that the first feature customers ask for migrating is Active Directory. Therefore, I wanted to try In-Place Upgrade, which has been improved in Windows Server 2019. To try this feature, I upgraded a forest that is handled by two domain controllers running on Windows Server 2016. It was not a “click and fun” process, but Microsoft has really improved In-Place Upgrade. Let’s take a look at how to migrate Windows Server 2016 DC to 2019.

Persistent Memory (PMEM) support is introduced in the recently released VMware vSphere 6.7. This new non-volatile memory type covers the gap in performance between the random-access memory (RAM) and Flash/SSD. But, is PMEM really that fast? In this article, I take a closer look at what persistent memory is and its performance.

Sometimes, you need your VMs to access a LUN directly over iSCSI. Direct access comes in handy when you, let’s say, run SAN/NAS-aware applications on vSphere VMs, or if you’re going to deploy some hardware-specific SCSI commands. Also, with direct access, physical-to-virtual conversion becomes possible without migrating a massive LUN to VMDK. Whatever. To enable your VMs to talk directly to LUN, you need a raw device mapping file. Recently, I created vSphere VMs with such disks. Well, apparently, this case is not unique, so I decided to share my experience in today’s article.

Veeam Backup and Replication is a backup and replication product. The backup part ensures your workloads are protected against bad manipulation, ransomware or disaster. It enables to restore the data in case of loss. The replication part ensures that your workloads can quickly start again in another datacenter in case of sinister in the first one. Products such as Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere can also handle this task. In this topic, I will show you how to leverage Veeam Backup and Replication to make a disaster recovery plan. The same steps can be applied to Hyper-V or VMware but in this topic, I will take VMware as example.

VMware OS Optimization Tool (OSOT) is a free tool provided by VMware Labs website. A website which is well known for the “Flings”, which are free utilities which helps IT admins in their day-to-day administration tasks. The utility uses templates which provides an easy way to disable windows services which aren’t mostly necessary. By disabling unnecessary services you’re basically make the system run more “light” so you’re saving resources which can be used for other programs.

Security is typically a hot-topic due also to several regulations and compliant rules and laws. But more important, a security breach can have huge collateral effects, also if no data has been stoled, or compromised. But, for example, a “simple” DoS attack that makes a service not available can have a bad effect on the reputation of a B2C company. This post will try to give an idea of some possible security threads in a virtual environment based on VMware vSphere (but several concepts are quite general also for other virtualization platforms) and some possible approaches to minimize the effect or prevent the attacks.