Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

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.