Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Adding a new feature among these is the recent update to their main backup tool for the cloud: Azure Backup Server now supports VMware virtual machines. MABS (Microsoft Azure Backup Server) it is not a new tool, it’s been around for a while now offering backups for Hyper-V virtual machines, physical machines, file servers, SQL, SharePoint, and Exchange.

Ever since PowerShell hit the stage it’s adoption has been increasing dramatically – Finally that Windows-based scripting language that not only appeals to Windows administrators with an easy to use structure but has been widely adopted by the industry surrounding the third-party applications.

Recently, it became known that there is a private, mysterious network stretching between London and Frankfurt that is twice as fast as the normal Internet. The connection, provided by a series of microwave dishes on masts, was completely secret to anyone but one company. Only when a competitor completed its own microwave link between the two cities, the first company revealed that it too had a link between the cities in order to get a share in this potential market. Similar stories can be found all over the world, but because these networks are privately owned, and because they are often used by financial groups trying to find an edge on the stock market and eke out a few extra billions, you have to investigate hard to find them.

In this topic, I’ll show you how to prepare a Nano Server image which will be deployed in a virtual machine. The operating system will be configured to run containers. To create the Nano Server image, I’ll use the Nano Server Image Builder tool which is a graphical interface to prepare the image in VHD, VHDX or WIM file format.

What’s the impact for IT regarding the US Presidential Election or Brexit? How is the world economy going to be affected in 2017 for the IT world? Where do we stand regarding private, hybrid and public clouds consumption? Will companies put IT jobs in danger by migrating massively to the public cloud in the next couple of years? Those are some of the big questions a lot of people are asking right now.

If you ever worked in IT, you have heard the acronym RAID.  RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (some call it Inexpensive) Disks. So, it basically refers to a group of disk logically presented as one or more volumes to the external system – a server, for instance. The main two reasons to have RAID are Performance and Redundancy.  With RAID, you can minimize the access time and increase the throughput of data. RAID also allows one or more disks in the array to fail without losing any data.

There was a time when “open source” and “Microsoft” were two words that did not get along, at all. Bill Gates when he was leading the Redmond Company said, even though the free software should be part of the ecosystem, the General Public License (GPL, licenses that used to rule most of the open source projects) has a “Pac-Man-like nature” that was destroying the “healthy ecosystem” for companies. Or even later when he said that the open source software is a “New Communism” (in a despicable way, of course).

Windows Server 2016 enables building a Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) with new layers of security and Azure-related approach for hosting business applications and infrastructure. The new Software-Defined Network (SDN) Stack  provides dynamic security and hybrid flexibility by enforcing network policy in the Hyper-V Virtual Switch using the Azure Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP) Switch Extension. Instead of programming network configurations into a physical switch,  the new Microsoft Network Controller delivers the network policy to the Hyper-V Hosts using the OVSDB protocol and is programmed into the VFP extension of the vSwitch by a Host Agent which enforces the policy.

Just recently one of the main virtualization conferences VMworld Europe 2016 has finished. Traditionally, it has been held a while after the main VMworld in the USA. While in the USA VMware was speaking about the new technologies and the future of datacenters, in Europe much more attention was paid to the new features of updated VMware products. The main of them is, of course, VMware vSphere 6.5 server virtualization platform. We’ll start our overview with it.