Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

SanDisk is one of few companies currently offering 1TB of storage in a single-sided M.2 card – its product X400 SSD. X400 also comes in a 2.5″ 7mm-height form factor, but the M.2 configuration is the main selling point of this line. 1TB M.2 X400 card allows getting the most out of the ultra-thin notebooks in terms of storage, without sacrificing performance or battery life.

In 2006 Windows Administrators got their first glimpse into what the world of PowerShell scripting might look like when PowerShell, which was then known as Monad was released under beta conditions to the world. 10 years later we are now into our 5th iteration of the scripting language and have seen a thriving ecosystem form around the Verb-Noun style of automation. PowerShell is a powerful tool and can be an amazing time-saver to for any Windows administrator to know. That said, as with any scripting/programming languages getting started can be a little daunting, especially if you have had no scripting experience to fall back on. Below we will take a look at 5 tips that can save you both time and energy when writing your PowerShell scripts.

Extend Active Directory to Microsoft Azure is a common scenario when you implement hybrid cloud. For example, protected VM with Azure Site Recovery may need access to Active Directory even if On-Premise datacenter is unreachable. You can also extend your Active Directory to Azure when you use production workloads in Azure VMs to avoid to implement a new forest or to avoid to use the VPN connection for all Active Directory workloads. In this topic, we will see how to extend the Active Directory to Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Operations Management Suite alerting has moved from preview mode to generally available status.

Google and Rackspace cooperate over creating a new server configuration based on IBM Power9 processors. The design is expected to be shared as part of the Open Compute Project. The hardware set will include 48V Open Compute racks by Google and Facebook collaborative development.

Here is a part of a series about Microsoft Resilient File System, first introduced in Windows Server 2012. It shows an experiment, conducted by StarWind engineers, dedicated to seeing the ReFS in action. This part is mostly about the FileIntegrity feature in the file system, its theoretical application and practical performance under real virtualization workload. The feature is responsible for data protection in ReFS, basically the reason for “resilient” in its name. It’s goal is avoidance of the common errors that typically lead to data loss. Theoretically, ReFS can detect and correct any data corruption without disturbing the user or disrupting production process.

This is a short overview of Microsoft Resilient File System, or ReFS. It introduces the subject and gives a short insight into its main characteristics and theoretical use. It is a part of a series of posts dedicated to ReFS and is, basically, an introduction to the practical posts. All the experiments that show how ReFS really performs, are also listed in the blog. ReFS seems to be a great replacement for the NTFS and its resilience is most convenient for cases, when data loss is critically unacceptable. The file system cooperates with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct in order to perform automatic corruption repairs, without any attention of the user.

Personally, I am getting rather tired of the dismissive tone adopted by virtualization and cloud vendors when you raise the issue of disaster recovery.  We previously discussed the limited scope of virtual systems clustering and failover:  active-passive and active-active server clusters with data mirroring is generally inadequate for recovery from interruption events that have a footprint larger than a given equipment rack or subnetwork.  Extending mirroring and cluster failover over distances greater than 80 kilometers is a dicey strategy, especially given the impact of latency and jitter on data transport over WAN links, which can create data deltas that can prevent successful application or database recovery altogether.

Snapshots in VMware vSphere often cause various problems with configurations and performance, unless they are properly used – for live backup of virtual machines and temporary keeping VM configuration before the update. However, using them in large infrastructures is unavoidable. At some point you may need to delete/consolidate virtual machine snapshots (Delete All button in Snapshot Manager), which is quite time-consuming and demanding in terms of storage performance. Thus it would be a good thing to know in advance how much time it takes.