Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

The RDMA wars in regards to SMB Direct: RoCE versus iWarp.

While updating VMware ESXi servers, VMware vSphere users may encounter the “No space left on device” error that pops up while executing the “esxcli software vib update” command. Interestingly, the problem occurs even though disks are doing well and have enough free space and df -h command proves that.

The Flavors of RDMA & what role DCB plays.

For that matter, I’ll create a file server of two types: “File server for general use” and Scale-Out File Server. For the latter, I’ll have two scenarios: VMs running and off. After that, I’m gonna evaluate the deduplication ratio using a free tool – StarWind Deduplication Analyzer. And finally, run data deduplication using the Windows Server 2016 Data Deduplication feature. We also need our storage shared, so for this purpose, I’ve decided on StarWind Virtual SAN Free.

What is RDMA and why do we like it.

Now that you deploy Cloudyn (see the other article), we will connect our AWS environment to have only one interface, to manage cost for all our cloud provider subscription. Be careful, from June, this interface will not be free anymore for AWS. It’ll cost you 1% of your annual subscription consumption.

Some months ago, Microsoft acquires the Cloudyn company. This company developed an interface to manage your cost and to have billing information, for one or multiple subscription, on one console. They support some other cloud service provider like AWS and Google Cloud, it’s why it’s very interesting. For Azure, it’s free of charge to use this software. You can connect your EA, CSP or other subscription. For AWS, it’s free until June, after it will cost 1% of your revenue (on AWS or Google Cloud).

In this article, I will describe how to manage Windows Containers via GUI. Docker provides a great Docker CLI that allows us to create, interact, and delete containers, but sometimes it’s nice to have an interface to manage Containers. There are many admins who much prefer a GUI tool to handle every task and it can be useful to use an interface when you have many containers to manage or if you start working with Docker. In this article, I don’t want to judge which GUI is better because it depends! You must use the GUI that will suit your needs. So do not hesitate to test this GUI.

Looking back at the previous articles in our “How-to-Core basics”, we have managed to install the Core version of Windows Server 2016. As well, the required networks were set, and the storage for the virtual machines was created. In the final part of the trilogy, I’ll cover the steps left to prepare the environment in order to make your production highly available and fault-tolerant.