Microsoft announced the release of VMM SDN Express for System Center Virtual Machines Manager 2016 to simplify their Software-Defined Networking (SDNv2) deployment infrastructure. In short, VMM SDN Express is basically a VMM PowerShell script and parameter file that help you to deploy a production-ready Software-Defined Networking on top of Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition and SCVMM 2016, and without you having to move through multiple wizards or having to wait for a long time.

In Part I of this series, we created the tenant virtual network and connecting two VMs to it using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and then we validated that both VMs can route between each other. In Part II, we created a public Virtual IP Address (VIP) on the Software Load Balancer (SLB) using VMM console and PowerShell through which we were able to access a website on the virtual network. We also created Site-to-site (S2S) VPN to a Remote site.

In Part I of this series, we created the tenant virtual network and connecting two VMs to it using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and then we validated they can route between each other. In this blog post Part II, we will be creating a public Virtual IP Address (VIP) on the Software Load Balancer (SLB) MUX using SCVMM and PowerShell through which you can access a website on your virtual network. We will also create Site-to-site (S2S) VPN to a Remote site. Please make sure to check Part I so you can have an overview of the infrastructure and the VMM Logical Network that we are using throughout this series.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) in Windows Server 2016 provides a method to centrally configure and manage physical and virtual network devices such as routers, switches, load balancers and gateways in your datacenter. Virtual network elements such as Hyper-V Virtual Switch, Hyper-V Network Virtualization, and RAS Gateway are designed to be integral elements of your SDN infrastructure. Please note that you must install Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition for Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines (VMs) that run SDN infrastructure servers, such as Network Controller and Software Load Balancing nodes. However, you can run Windows Server 2016 Standard edition for Hyper-V hosts that contain only tenant workload virtual machines that are connected to SDN-controlled networks.

Security is a critical requirement of any organization’s system. With the release of Windows Server 2016, Microsoft puts a lot of efforts around security and added a lot of new features. One hot feature that will add a lot of benefits to any small, medium and enterprise business environments is Shielded Virtual Machines and Key Storage Drive (KSD). Be sure that’s going to help you to increase the security whether you are a service provider or enterprise customer.

With the release of Windows Server 2016, there’s a lot of new features that have been added to increase availability and security. One hot feature that will add a lot of benefits for small, medium and enterprise business environments is Storage Replica (SR). Be sure that’s going to help you in your Disaster Recovery Plan and protect your data against catastrophic losses.

With the release of Windows Server 2016, Microsoft is introducing Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), which enables building highly available Software-Defined Storage systems with local attached storage. This storage can be leveraged by VMs running on the same cluster (in hyper-converged mode) or the storage can be presented as a File Share (in disaggregated mode). The hyper-converged deployment scenario has the Hyper-V (compute) and Storage Spaces Direct (storage) components on the same cluster. Virtual machine’s files are stored on local CSVs. Once Storage Spaces Direct is configured and the CSV volumes are available, configuring and provisioning Hyper-V is the same process and uses the same tools that you would use with any other Hyper-V deployment on a failover cluster.

With the release of Windows Server 2016, Microsoft is introducing a new type of teaming approach called Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) which is a virtualization aware, how is that different from NIC Teaming (LBFO), the first part it is embedded into the Hyper-V virtual switch, that means a couple of things, the first one you don’t have any team interfaces anymore, you won’t be able to build anything extra on top of it, you can’t set property on the team because it’s part of the virtual switch, you set all the properties directly on the vSwitch. This is targeted to support Software Defined Networking (SDN) switch capabilities, it’s not a general purpose use everywhere teaming solution that NIC Teaming was intended to be. So this is specifically integrated with Packet Direct, Converged RDMA vNIC and SDN-QoS. It’s only supported when using the SDN-Extension.

Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a technology introduced by Microsoft in Windows PowerShell v4.0. At the time of writing, we are at PowerShell v5.0. If you are new to PowerShell DSC, I highly encourage you to start investing and learning this awesome technology today.