Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Picture this – you are working away developing a PowerCLI script that is performing multiple actions – you have it just about complete when you come to a roadblock.  After frantically googling around you find out that this one task you are trying to perform simply cannot be done through PowerShell, yet you know it exists within the local ESXi esxcli command namespace!  This has happened multiple times to me and thankfully, there is a way to access ESXi’s esxcli command namespace without having to leave the comforts of the PowerShell Console. Chances are that if you have been working at all with ESXi you are familiar with the esxcli command – but for those that aren’t let’s take a quick look at what exactly it does.

We’ve reviewed several times about the large supremacy around AWS and Azure regarding cloud services market share (more details about recent surveys can be found here: “AWS Bigger in SMBs but Azure is the Service Most Likely to Renew or Purchase”) and Google Cloud lands in third place for most of the services.  Now they are implementing new NVIDIA GPUs for their virtual machines and sustained discounts for customers using the new NVIDIA VMs.

This spring, during VeeamON 2017, Veeam Software presented Veeam Powered Network (VeeamPN), their first solution in the field of enterprise networking. Veeam PN is a simple tool for establishing VPN between all parts of a distributed infrastructure: the headquarters, remote and branch offices, employees working remotely, etc. This solution is based on the OpenVPN technology.

If you read my blog on Switch Embedded Teaming with RDMA (for SMB Direct) you’ll notice that I set the -IeeePriorityTag to “On” on the vNICs that use DCB for QoS. This requires some explanation. When you configure a Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) vSwitch and define one or more management OS vNICs on which you enable RDMA you will see that the SMB Direct traffic gets it priority tag set correctly. This always happens no matter what you set the -IeeePriorityTag option to. On or Off, it doesn’t make a difference. It works out of the box.

A few years ago, we have tried to place a VM on an NFS share. We used Windows Server 2012 because Hyper-V is a native hypervisor from Microsoft. Now we have decided to reproduce the experiment on Windows Server 2016. Just because of boundless curiosity 😊 So, we have 2 nodes: S3n11 serves as NFS Fileserver and S3n12 takes the Hyper-V server role. We will do exactly the same thing as we did before, but this time on Windows Server 2016 on both VMs. Let’s start!

Or should we expressed it differently, Hulu welcomes AWS but Dropbox moves away? I guess is still semantics, the information is the same. But the positive or negative connotation will depend on what service do you consider more relevant: Hulu or Dropbox. The fact still remains that Dropbox recently decided to opt for building their own cloud and Hulu is now one more streaming media company using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Window Server 2016 Hyper-V brought us Switch Embedded teaming (SET). That’s the way forward when it comes to converged networking and Software-Defined Networking with the network controller and network virtualization.  It also allows for the use of RDMA on a management OS virtual NIC (vNIC). One of the capabilities within SET is affinitizing a vNIC to a particular team member, that is a physical NIC (pNIC). This isn’t a hard requirement for SET to work properly but it helps in certain scenarios. With a vNIC we mean either a management OS vNIC or a virtual machine vNIC actually, affinitizing can be done for both. The main use case and focus here and in real life is in the management OS vNICs we use for SMB Direct traffic.

Greetings, fellow sysadmins and everyone who is still wondering how to make their SQL server highly available! You’re just in time since I’ve prepared for you detailed guidelines with pictures and explanations on how to achieve this goal by using the SQL Server AlwaysOn approach! The great thing is that we are also going to configure and review the full-fledged system with the disaster recovery scenarios implemented. I’ve decided to break this topic into 3 parts. First, we will go through the process of configuring AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance (FCI), the next part of this series will cover the deployment of a DR site for our cluster using AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and finally, we will learn more about how to achieve the same using 3rd party software.

Creating automation and orchestration requires taking multiple data center components which all speak different languages and chaining them together through one consistent workflow. Now there are a lot of programming and scripting languages that we can use as our orchestration engine such as Java, JavaScript, Perl, etc. – but one of the most common choices within the last 5 years has been PowerShell.