Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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).

In this second part of VCHA review I will be covering some ‘gotchas’ and configuration steps that are not covered in the VMware availability guide We will also go through all steps of Advanced Configuration.

High Availability for vCenter Server has never been as important as today when there are so many products dependant on vCenter, e.g. VMware NSX, vSAN, Horizon View, etc. VMware tried different approaches to bring HA to the vCenter.

I the mist of all the software VMware has released as of late, one has missed the radar of most people. I must admit, that this might not be as exciting as a new vSphere release, to most people. To me it is a tale of what is to come and it is a harbinger of new and exciting times where UI, UX and API are first class citizens of VMware’s software stack.

Big news: this year Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.