Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

NUMA stands for Non Unified Memory Access and Nehalem was the first generation of Intel CPUs where NUMA was presented. However, the first commercial implementation of NUMA goes back to 1985, developed in Honeywell Information Systems Italy XPS-100 by Dan Gielan.

Solid-State-Drives are becoming widely implemented in ESXi hosts for caching (vFlash Read Cache, PernixData FVP), Virtual SAN or plain Datastores. Unfortunately, SSDs have limited lifetime per cell. Its value may range from 1.000 times in consumer TLC SSDs up to 100.000 times in enterprise SLC based SSDs. Lifetime can be estimated by device TBW parameters provided by vendor in its specification, It describes how many Terabytes can be written to the entire device, until the warranty expires.

The next version of Hyper-V which comes with Windows Server 2016, brings a new feature called Virtual Network Adapter Identification. This feature enables to specify a name when a network adapter is added to the virtual machine and to retrieve this same name inside the VM. This feature can be also managed from Virtual Machine Manager 2016. This feature is really great to automate the renaming of the virtual network adapters inside VMs. In this topic I’ll show you how it is working and how to automate the renaming of the network adapters with PowerShell.

Nano Server is a headless, remotely managed version of its server product that comes as a separate installation option in Windows Server 2016, which is in Technical Preview 5 at the moment, but is thought to represent the final feature version before RTM.

Here is an overview dedicated to disaster recovery, more specific, it’s about the DR capabilities of Microsoft Storage Replica – a new feature of Windows Server 2016. It takes a glance on the DR process itself and then brings a few details of the Storage Replica operation, its features, and peculiarities. They include zero data loss, block-level replication, simple deployment and management, guest and host, SMB3 protocol, high security, high performance, consistency groups, user delegation, network constraint, thin provisioning, etc. The post is, basically, an introduction to a series of experiments also listed on the blog. They were conducted in order to check the functionality and performance of Microsoft Storage Replica in different use cases.