Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

One new announced feature in Windows Server 2019 is Storage Migration Service (SMS). SMS enables to ease drastically the migration from a file server to another. Moreover, SMS is fully manageable from Windows Admin Center as Microsoft has released an extension for this feature.

In Windows 10 Fall Creator Update, Microsoft introduced a new feature called the “Hyper-V Quick Create Wizard” which is very useful because you can create a Virtual Machine with the default settings and save time. Using this feature, you can create a VM with a single ISO file located on your system, or you can create a VM from the Online Gallery. By default, Quick Create will list a Windows 10 Developer Environment but you can easily add your own Virtual Machine Images from your local/online repository. In this article, I will describe how to use this feature and how to add a custom VM Image into your own Gallery.

Microsoft released a few weeks ago a new feature, to backup your SQL Server databases, directly from Azure Backup.  This new functionality is very interesting and is working smoothly for a preview. Adding of other databases types like Oracle, MySQL, PostGre, etc. could be very interesting.

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.

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.