As every admin knows way too well, administrating an IT infrastructure is not an easy job. If you plan on performing everything manually, you’ll find yourself buried in tasks. That’s why command-line shells do exist and why today we’ll take a look on how to write a function in Windows PowerShell!
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How is NVMe-oF doing? Part 3: StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator + Linux SPDK NVMe-oF Target
Finally, I got the hands-on experience with StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator. I read that StarWind did a lot of work to bring NVMe-oF to Windows (it’s basically the first solution of its kind), so it’s quite interesting for me to see how their initiator works! In today’s post, I measure the performance of NVMe drive presented over Linux SPDK NVMe-oF Target while talking to it over StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator.
How is NVMe-oF doing? Part 2: Chelsio NVMe-oF Initiator + Linux SPDK NVMe-oF Target
While some OS-s built on Linux kernel support NVMe-oF, Windows just does not. No worries, there are some ways to bring this protocol to a Windows environment! In this article, I investigate whether presenting an NVMe drive over RDMA with Linux SPDK NVMe-oF Target + Chelsio NVMe-oF Initiator provides you the perfomance that vendors of flash list in their datasheets.
Setting up a Windows Failover Cluster for a home lab
Setting up a failover cluster is a thing that admins must do. To build such cluster, you need to configure shared storage. And, there are a lot of ways to do that. Today, I’d like to discuss how to build a Windows Failover Cluster using a virtual SAN solution (StarWind Virtual SAN) as a shared storage provider.
What is a Hyper-V Quick Create VM gallery & how to create one?
Windows 10 Creator Update introduced Quick Create to Hyper-V, the feature allowing to create a custom VM from a Hyper-V Quick Create gallery image. It is a handy tool for testing new software or OS features which developers and guys in QA may enjoy a lot. This being said, I describe today how to create a VM template and add it to a gallery.
PowerShell commands & scripts do not work. How can I fix it?
In my today’s topic, I discuss why PowerShell behaves like that. Specifically, I shed light on why you cannot run scripts or access a computer on a different domain. Also, I’ll take a closer look at how some cmdlets work.
Who’s got bigger balls? Testing NFS vs iSCSI performance. Part 2: configuring iSCSI
Cheers friends, not so long ago we’ve run through the process of configuring an NFS disk and connecting it to the VMware host. What we’re gonna do is measure and compare the performance of NFS and iSCSI network protocols to see which one is more suitable for building a virtualized infrastructure. So, in this part, we’ll create an iSCSI device and connect it to the VMware ESXi host.
Who’s got bigger balls? Testing NFS vs iSCSI performance. Part 1: configuring NFS
Hi there! There have been pretty much debates over which network protocol is better: NFS or iSCSI when building a virtualization infrastructure. Some experts argue that iSCSI gives better performance and reliability due to block-based storage approach while others go in favour of NFS citing management simplicity, large data stores and the availability of cost-saving features like data deduplication on some NFS arrays.
Anyway, we’re not here for polemics but to see which protocol is better for your production environment, meaning, which one really provides higher performance for your mission-critical applications. That’s what we all want, right?
Just to make it clear, the whole project will be divided into three parts: configuring NFS, configuring iSCSI, and the testing itself.
So, first things first. In this first chapter, I’ll guide you through the process of configuring and preparing the NFS protocol for further testing.
So, as Michael Buffer uses to say: “Let’s get ready to rumble!”.
Who’s got bigger balls? Testing NFS vs iSCSI performance. Part 1: configuring NFS
Hi there! There have been pretty much debates over which network protocol is better: NFS or iSCSI when building a virtualization infrastructure. Some experts argue that iSCSI gives better performance and reliability due to block-based storage approach while others go in favour of NFS citing management simplicity, large data stores and the availability of cost-saving features like data deduplication on some NFS arrays.
Anyway, we’re not here for polemics but to see which protocol is better for your production environment, meaning, which one really provides higher performance for your mission-critical applications. That’s what we all want, right?
Just to make it clear, the whole project will be divided into three parts: configuring NFS, configuring iSCSI, and the testing itself.
So, first things first. In this first chapter, I’ll guide you through the process of configuring and preparing the NFS protocol for further testing.
So, as Michael Buffer uses to say: “Let’s get ready to rumble!”.
Configuring Time Synchronization for all Computers in a Windows domain
Microsoft operating systems and server applications are becoming increasingly dependent on proper time synchronization. A skewed system clock can affect your ability to log on, can cause problems with mail flow in Exchange, and be the source of a great many difficult-to-locate problems. To compound matters, the default method of handling time synchronization within a Windows network isn’t exactly reliable or even predictable. If a Hyper-V host’s clock becomes out of sync, it usually affects all of its virtual machines, sometimes catastrophically. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much work to get everything in sync.
Pick a Computer to Server as the Authoritative Internal Time Source
The first thing you want to do is decide what machine you want to serve as the authority of time within your domain. In most cases, I choose the domain controller that holds the PDC emulator role. According to Microsoft’s documentation, that’s supposed to be the highest authority on the matter anyway, although it doesn’t seem to work out that way in practice. The machine that you choose will be regularly consulting Internet sources, so if you’re in a high-security facility, you might consider delegating this role to a different computer. You could have multiple machines serving as authoritative time sources, but more than one per site generally is unnecessary. You could also have one machine pull external time and have your PDC emulator use that as its source while still serving as the authoritative server for the rest of the computers in your domain.