Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

It has three years since VMware announced and showcased NSX to the world. Since then everyone and then some has announced their version of SDN. You have players such a Cisco, Cumulus Networks and of course VMware in this space. All doing SDN in their own unique way. Cisco being the biggest network player of course wants to move hardware to your datacenter. Therefore, their way to SDN is to buy new boxes. Another player is Cumulus Networks, again theirs another focus. Here the OS is king. Build on open source components Cumulus Networks deliver the OS for SDN, which run on any white box. If you do not want to build your own white box networks based on Cumulus Networks many vendors have, join Cumulus Networks. Vendors such as HPE, Dell and Supermicro amongst others are selling switches, which comes with Cumulus Networks OS baked in. Even Microsoft is entering the stage of SDN with Server 2016, though one could argue a bit late, but then better late than never.

As far back as 2 years ago at VMworld Europe 2014 conference VMware announced the release of the VMware Horizon FLEX solution. It is a virtualization platform for desktops, which allows running virtual machines locally on users’ computers, both on Mac and with Windows, while connection to the company’s datacenter isn’t available. At the same time, the virtual machine utilized by the user can be Windows-based or have guest OS Linux inside. Many virtual infrastructures administrators still remember that before VMware had VMware ACE and VMware View Local Mode products, which passed long ago and now have been replaced with FLEX technology. Since VMware Horizon FLEX 1.9 version, as well as the new versions of Workstation and Fusion desktop platforms, has been released just recently, let’s look closer at the FLEX solution and consider its key features.

I’m currently discovering Microsoft OMS and it’s why, today, I’ll explain to you how to create your view in OMS, for IIS servers.

WD issued Blue and Green branded SATA SSDs, which are based on SanDisk technology for the first time. The Green brand is for secondary storage, being reliable, cool and eco-friendly, whereas Blue ones are built for PC primary storage use. Other WD brand colours include Black for enthusiast products and Red for NAS and SOHO (small office, home office) use. The Blue and Green SATA SSDs are designed to be used mainly in notebooks, PCs and workstations. The Blue product is optimized for multi-tasking and resource-heavy applications. Still, WD states that the Green SSDs deliver essential-class performance, and are a great option for every-day use.

This day has come – vSphere 6.5 has been just announced. As many of you I have been waiting for the presentation of new vSphere during VMworld event in the USA, but I guess VMware preferred to use vSphere 6.5 as a treat for those who were in doubt whether to attend VMworld Europe or not after all VMworld US were made available online to everyone; or perhaps VMware hasn’t decided what features should be included into the GA release. In this post, I will try to cover all new features of vSphere 6.5 and VSAN 6.5, but if I missed something feel free to let me know by leaving a comment. To be honest, there is so much to talk about and some of the new features require separate posts to be explained properly. Therefore, please don’t expect detailed review of the every single feature.. This is more ‘What’s new in vSphere 6.5 and VSAN 6.5’ overview, but in the future posts I will be talking about some of the most interesting improvements and enhancements in detail.

Security is a critical requirement of any organization’s system. With the release of Windows Server 2016, Microsoft puts a lot of efforts around security and added a lot of new features. One hot feature that will add a lot of benefits to any small, medium and enterprise business environments is Shielded Virtual Machines and Key Storage Drive (KSD). Be sure that’s going to help you to increase the security whether you are a service provider or enterprise customer.

What works for 100 users very often doesn’t work for 10,000, and vice versa. Few vendors worry about making software created for the enterprise meet the needs of the SMB. Those who try to fit both worlds, rarely succeed. Specifically, let us look at Active Directory (AD) replication times. By default, AD is scheduled to do inter-site replication every 180 minutes (three hours), which makes sense if the AD is huge, and one or more of the sites is on the other end of connectivity from the past. This value can be changed from the default to occur as frequently as once every 15 minutes, representing a somewhat conservative minimum replication interval.

With the release of Windows Server 2016, there’s a lot of new features that have been added to increase availability and security. One hot feature that will add a lot of benefits for small, medium and enterprise business environments is Storage Replica (SR). Be sure that’s going to help you in your Disaster Recovery Plan and protect your data against catastrophic losses.

Microsoft has released the final version of Windows Server 2016. I thought that it might be a good idea to create a USB stick that can be used as a source to install the Windows Server 2016 OS to other servers/workstations. There are many free tools that can be used to do the job, but sometimes you just don’t have that option or simply you do not want to use any free tools for this job. It is not so difficult to create a bootable USB, and this post will teach you how to do that in 6 easy steps.