Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Microsoft is expanding the features and functionalities constantly, two of the key aspects related to the new Azure features are related to enhancing end-user interaction and facilitate the work in the DevOps world. Azure now has the “Bot-as-a-Service” available where customers can use these automated text-based exchanges systems with their own customers.

Probably Amazon started to ask themselves on how to accelerate cloud migrations if they can’t control the amount of data customer needs and the fact they can’t offer –yet- unlimited upload speed. And most likely following the “simple is safe” guideline, Amazon is now offering migration your data to the cloud by driving a truck to your datacenter, filling it with what you need and “driving it back” to AWS and the cloud.

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.

The new device by Synology, an all-flash NAS named FS3017, marks the first time the vendor has issued something entirely targeted for flash, not simply also supporting it. FS3017 is said to be ideal for big data analysis, video post-production, virtualization, and handling demanding database applications.

VMware vSphere 6.5 has been released few weeks back and many users would like to hit the upgrade button. Not so fast. In this post I’ll talk a little bit about what to consider before upgrading to vSphere 6.5. One of the good news is that there are no new license keys needed for vSphere 6.5 so if you’re currently on vSphere 6.0 you don’t need to enter new license keys.

Starting from VMware Tools 10.0 version, VMware has done these packages downloadable separately from VMware ESXi distributions. They are available here. To see the active VMware Tools version installed in your VM, simply look at VM properties in vSphere Client.

If you’ve been talking to customers about a cloud, no matter what platform, I’m pretty sure that you heard from almost any of them that one of their major concerns about the public cloud paradigm is security. Especially when you are talking to the public sector or private companies, like financial institutions, where their entire business relies on their workloads and users secure environment. Azure Government represents an isolated version of Azure dedicated to these customers, where most of the Azure features are available under strict compliance rules. In order to enhance this service, Microsoft released recently to GA (General Availability) a key component of the Azure Government service: Virtual Cloud Defense (VCD).