Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

This is an overview of the Server Message Block (SMB3) protocol from Microsoft. It offers a short insight into the history of SMB3 creation and development over the years (as the idea is technically around 30 years old). As of Windows Server 2012, the protocol got new features: SMB Transparent Failover, SMB Scale Out, SMB Multichannel, SMB Direct, SMB Encryption, VSS for SMB file shares, SMB Directory Leasing, SMB PowerShell. In Windows Server 2016, it also got Pre-authentication integrity and Cluster dialect fencing. The post concentrates on RDMA-capable SMB Direct and MPIO-utilizing SMB Multichannel and their benefits. Also, it is an introduction to a series of tests aimed at creating SMB 3.0 File Servers in an unusual way.

While the Windows Server 2016 “Technical Preview (TP) 5 has had the option for restoring data via System Restore protection, Microsoft did not keep this option in the final release. As such, we have only two built-in options. After spyware and malware IT administrators do have to face another threat – A Ransomware. You have to pay to recover your data that has been encrypted by malware. Clever move from the Pirate’s perspective. Indeed. Pirates are hoping that they can make some dirty money out of it. And sometimes they’re successful. You might be asking what can you do, as a system administrator, to protect yourself against ransomware?

As we know, Backblaze publishes the specifications its product – Storage Pods, and recently it has announced its sixth generation design, with the number of disks rising from 45 to 60 while reducing costs down even further.

In part two of this multi part blog series, we covered the creation and configuration of a GitHub account, to host a GitHub repository for a Quick Start template, and then we examined Visual Studio Code integration with Git and lastly we pushed commits to a remote repository on GitHub. In the final post, we will modify and deploy sample and custom template and parameter JSON files. If you missed Part I and Part II, please make sure to check them here Part I and Part II before you continue with the last part.

In part one of this multi part blog series, we explained the benefits of Azure Resource Manager and resource groups in Azure V2 versus the Service Management API in Azure V1, then we looked in depth at JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Quick Start templates. In the second part, Part II: we will create and configure a GitHub account, if you don’t already have one, to host a GitHub repository for a Quick Start template, and lastly we will examine Visual Studio Code integration with Git and push commits to a remote repository. In the final post, we will modify and deploy sample/custom template and parameter JSON files. If you missed Part I, please make sure to check it here before you continue with this post.

With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V became truly NUMA aware.  A virtual NUMA topology is presented to the guest operating system. By default, the virtual NUMA topology is optimized by matching the NUMA topology of physical host. This enables Hyper-V to get the optimal performance for virtual machines with high performance, NUMA aware workloads where large numbers of vCPUs and lots of memory come into play. A great and well known example of this is SQL Server.

Many of you have heard of Virtual Volumes (VVols) storage technology, which allows essential increasing of storage I/O performance within VMware vSphere environment by using logical volumes for certain virtual machines components and transferring of some storage operations to disk arrays.

As I review the marketing pitches of many software-defined storage products today, I am concerned by the lack of attention in any of the software stack descriptions to any capabilities whatsoever for managing the underlying hardware infrastructure. This strikes me as a huge oversight. The truth is that delivering storage services via software — orchestrating and administering the delivery of capacity, data encryption, data protection and other services to the data that are hosted on a software-defined storage volume – is only half of the challenge of storage administration. The other part is maintaining the health and integrity of the gear and the interconnect cabling that provide the all-important physical underlayment of an increasingly virtualized world.

Applications that are deployed in Microsoft Azure often comprise different but related cloud resources, such as virtual machines, web applications, SQL databases, virtual networks among others. Before the introduction of Azure Resource Manager (Azure V2), it was necessary to define and provision these resources imperatively. However, Azure Resource Manager gives you the ability to define and provision these resources with their configuration and associated parameters declaratively in a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) template file, known as an Azure Resource Manager template.