Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

In the previous topics, we have installed and updated Veeam B&R 9.5. Then we have connected Veeam to vCenter 6.5 to get visibility on VMware VM and backup them. To finish, we have added a backup repository to store backup files. Now we can backup a virtual machine. Once we have some restore points, we can also recover the VM.

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.

Microsoft keeps going big on offering VMware integration, we’ve mentioned in the past that they’ve released a freeware tool to backup VMware virtual machines into Azure: Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS). And now they keep insisting on taking over Enterprise VMware customers into Azure, or at least their Site Recovery solution: Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware.

This article is intended to introduce you to the main concepts and features of Fibre Channel (FC), the high-speed network technology and a relevant family of standards (protocols) for storage networking that was standardized in 1994.

In Part II we will review the remaining improvements in vSphere Availability and Resource Management brought by vSphere 6.5.

A number of improvements that have been introduced in vSphere HA and DRS in the last several years are impressive. vSphere 6.5 continues this tradition by bringing new features into HA Admission Control, by adding flexibility with HA Orchestrated Restart and by enabling DRS to make more intelligent balancing. I will be trying a new format today. First, I will be explaining the challenges you might have had in previous vSphere releases and then I will show you how the new vSphere 6.5 HA & DRS features address those challenges.

The network component and the troubleshooting that sometimes we need to do represents a big factor on all cloud customers, not matter if you are using Azure, AWS, Office 365 or any other. If you don’t have control over the network and/or you are not capable of identifying issues root causes, then there’s most likely the cloud experience it’s not going to be a good one. Microsoft has that clear and is now offering a new tool to assist customers: Azure Network Watcher.

In this article, we will not cover all the Exchange Management cmdlets but I will describe several examples to guide you in the right direction. In all Exchange Server edition, a lot of settings are configured automatically by the Exchange installation. So it is a good idea to explore all the settings individually to become familiar with your Exchange Server.

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.