Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be one of the trends in 2017, the two big cloud providers are investing a large amount of money into developing new technologies in this area. Amazon Web Services (AWS) released in December 2016 several new services customers can acquire within their cloud offerings: Polly, Rekognition and Lex.

Microsoft releases a new version of Azure AD Connect (previous was called DirSync) that help you to synchronize your on-premises Active Directory to Azure AD. 2 new functionalities appear with this new version.

DiskStation DS916+ is a further improvement of DS415+ model. Storage capacity in DS916+ can be scaled using DX513 expansion units, making a total of nine 3.5 disk bays. Given the relatively small form factor and impressive capacity potential, such configuration may become a great solution for small businesses and enthusiasts.

Microsoft continues with its expansion over Europe, offering new Azure Services most precisely within their brand new UK datacenters. The new services focus on PowerBI, SQL Server and Azure Functions; all of those are currently available for European customers.

As is well-known, VMware has released a new version of virtual VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 in the new version of vSphere 6.5 platform. Now vCSA is Photon OS-based. It works faster; it is provided with built-in high availability tools and has a ready-to-use vCenter Update Manager (VUM).  

The Virtualization Review Editor’s Choice is a selection of the most outstanding virtualization products of 2016. It is based on the opinions and overlooks by the trusted experts in the fields of virtualization and cloud computing. This is not the “best of the best rating”. No criteria were applied to make the list. This is just the collection of individual choices of writers, who deal with the industry daily, so they have pointed out virtualization solutions they found especially interesting and useful.

We’ve discussed in previous posts about Azure and the security topic as being one of the most critical ones for customers and therefore to Microsoft as well. Because of that, the Redmond based company has been including several new enhancements and features into Azure Security Center. One of the latest is the integrated vulnerability assessment.

For those of you who do not know vRealize Log Insight. It is a log collector and analyzer, with a pretty, simple and intuitive GUI. An easy way of managing logs and messages from all your datacenter devices. Best of all, it is not a VMware only product! In that sense that as long as the message is in syslog format it can be ingest by Log Insight. Wait, that is not all. If the device does not support syslog, like a Windows server. The Log Insight agent you can install on the OS in question. The Log Insight agent can handle Windows event viewer messages and log files of any kind. So even applications that do not adhere to any of the normal ways of logging messages (like syslog or windows event viewer), can still be collected, by specifying the location and format of the log file(s).

Image2Docker is a tool to convert some Windows Server roles to Docker containers (on Windows, for sure). With this new version, it’s possible to extract ASP.NET website to run them in containers. To start, I created a VM with 3 ASP.NET websites.