Introduction

This article describes the deployment of a Ceph cluster in one instance or as it’s called “Ceph-all-in-one”. As you may know, Ceph is a unified Software-Defined Storage system designed for great performance, reliability, and scalability. With the help of Ceph, you can build an environment with the desired size. You can start with a one-node system and there are no limits in its sizing. I will show you how to build the Ceph cluster on top of one virtual machine (or instance). You should never use such scenario in production, only for testing purposes.

The series of articles will guide you through the deployment and configuration of different Ceph cluster builds.

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Introduction

This article describes the new StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance, which was released on 26^th of April. StarWind has always been a Windows native solution. However, due to market trends and the huge interest of our customers, we have decided to work in Linux direction. The main goal of the article is to show what StarWind VSA can do for clients and how you can work with it.

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Linux virtual machines in a cloud service like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure have become a very common practice. You can find pretty much anything that you need regarding Linux applications, including appliances or even PaaS technologies that actually work with Linux in the backend. Now Ubuntu has decided to go a bit further than that and offers an OS version with a customized kernel for AWS.

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The past month has been categorized as something of a performance and upgrades challenge as one of the constant calls I hear is “application X is going to slow”, of course, a month ago it was fine but today it isn’t and normally this is just down to increasing load.
One of the common fixes for increasing load is to add more vCPU and RAM but often that can cause its own set of problems especially when NUMA boundaries are crossed and when vCPU contention pushes things a little too far.
The second part of the challenge is the upgrade challenge where various applications need upgrading but there are dependency chains to take into account, this is the sort of thing where application X needs a very specific version of application y. In those cases, an upgrade is much easier to do by reinstalling the OS and starting again then transferring the data across!

As a potential solution to these issues that I’ve been exploring is Docker on VMWare’s Photon OS.

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On this blog, we reviewed a couple of times Azure Backup capabilities and integration with, what Microsoft considered a while back, strong rival: VMware (“Azure Offers Backing Up VMware VMs with a Freeware Tool”). And now they added one more interesting and highly valuable feature, Azure Backup will be able to support backing up applications in Linux.

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There has certainly been no lack of surprises coming from Redmond over the past year or so. As soon as Satya Nadella took the reins of Microsoft it has seemed like a barrage of Microsoft news hitting the wires – but this news does not fall within the traditional line of Microsoft. Open sourcing .net, open sourcing PowerShell, and finally, providing a means to run MS SQL Server on Linux. Don’t get me wrong – this is great news for the IT world. Cross compatibility, platform independent – these words are words that excite me. Microsoft has taken notice of the dominance of the cloud, more so, the dominance of Linux within the cloud. Certainly, releasing the ability to take a Linux instance within the cloud and run our SQL Server on it is a step in the right direction – for Microsoft, and for us as IT professionals.
Just like PowerShell the MS SQL Linux deployment supports a limited number of distributions – more specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Ubuntu Server 16.04.

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Big news: this year Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.

Microsoft contributed a lot to Linux over the past several years, first of all, with improving support for Hyper-V. The company appears to be a reasonably good open source community member, not just publishing source code repositories that are sporadically updated from an internal development branch, but actually performing development in the open community contributions and being open for discussion and finding consensus regarding new features.

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We will see how to install and use tools to manage your SQL Servers. We will use the version 13, who is compatible with Ubuntu. You can use these drivers from SQL Server 2008 to 2016, and it’s compatible with Azure SQL Database too.

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Today, we will see how to join an Ubuntu server (version 16.04) to an Active Directory domain. It could be useful in case of you want that your administrators use their domain account to connect to servers, etc.

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New Integrity MC990 X is the first server in a line conforming to the new naming convention, with ‘MC’ standing for ‘mission critical’ and ‘X’ standing for ‘Xeon’.It replaces the Proliant DL980 (‘DL’ – ‘density line’). The name changes are implemented in order to meet specific customer needs, e.g., high performance and cloud computing. HP will keep the Proliant name for low-end and mid-range servers, and also keep the BL (blade) designation.

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