Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

The works of Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, have helped Microsoft to patch a significant security issue in its implementation of the NetBIOS protocol that affected all Windows existing versions. It was found out that the attacker can exploit this vulnerability to pass as a WPAD or ISATAP server and redirect all the victim’s network traffic through a point controlled by the attacker. Network traffic here means not just Web HTTP and HTTPS, but also OS updates, software upgrades, Certificate Revocation List updates via Microsoft’s Crypto API, and other OS maintenance operations.

The QoS policy was a feature included in Windows Server 2012 R2 that enabled to set a minimum and a maximum IOPS on a VHD(X). These policies were not centralized and you had to set the QoS policy on each VHD(X) independently. In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has improved this feature because the policy can now be stored in the cluster database. You can create a policy based on a minimum / maximum IOPS and/or a bandwidth. This policy can be applied to a VHD(X) (Dedicated Policy Type) or to a set of VHD(X) (Aggregated policy Type).

This is a comprehensive comparison of the leading products of the Software-Defined Storage market, featuring Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, VMware Virtual SAN and VSAN from StarWind. It provides numerous use cases, based on different deployment scales and architectures, because the mentioned products all have different aims. As the market is already large enough, the vendors used to dwell its different parts, but lately they entered a full-scale competition, adapting their products to meet general demand. This post is an analysis of how Microsoft, VMware and StarWind fare in in the Software-Defined Storage market right now. The approach is practical and all the statements are based on the experience of virtualization administrators and engineers from all over the world.

Microsoft has created its own edition of FreeBSD 10.3 in order to make the OS available and supported in Azure. As Jason Anderson, principal PM manager at Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center says, “Redmond took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image” so it could “ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure”.

Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a technology introduced by Microsoft in Windows PowerShell v4.0. At the time of writing, we are at PowerShell v5.0. If you are new to PowerShell DSC, I highly encourage you to start investing and learning this awesome technology today.

Micron has announced its first 3D NAND SSDs, triple-level cell (3bits/cell) 1100 and 2200 products. The 1100 is a 6Gbit/s SATA product coming in 2.5-inch and M.2 SATA formats in 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB and 2048GB (2.5-inch only) capacity points, it uses 32-layer TLC NAND with 384Gb dice.

From December 2015, Microsoft has given the possibility to create your own RBAC roles. I will show you today, how to do this. To start, connect via PowerShell to your Azure RM subscription:

You may know that memory page deduplication technology Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) becomes useless with large memory pages (it’s even disabled in the latest versions of VMware vSphere). However, this doesn’t mean that TPS goes into the trash bin, because when lacking resources on the host-server, ESXi may break large pages into small ones and deduplicate them afterwards. In the process, the large pages are prepared for deduplication beforehand: in case the memory workload grows up to a certain limit the large pages a broken into small ones and then, when the workload peaks, forced deduplication cycle is activated.

Citrix has revealed a desktop thin client based on the Raspberry Pi microcomputer – HDX Ready Pi, which is a Citrix-built box containing the Raspberry Pi 3 hardware and a ViewSonic Linux build designed specifically to run with the Citrix HDX virtual desktop platform. The device contains a Raspberry Pi 3 board, a power supply and ports for the Pi’s HDMI, ethernet and USB connections. It connects to a XenDesktop and XenApp server that hosts the virtual instances of each individual PC.