Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Veritas is a great offer for storing Office 365 data without any hard commitment. It doesn’t need any backup infrastructure since it comes as software-as-a-service (SaaS). In addition, your data will be encrypted, pursuant to GDPR rules, while it’s stored at the Veritas Datacenter in Denmark. Finally, the price for unlimited storage here is as good as it gets.

Keeping up with priorities, subscriptions, resource groups, and other policies in a hyper-converged environment can be quite challenging. Azure Policy helps receive an aggregated view of your environment via a compliance dashboard. It simplifies enforcing standards and allows you to effortlessly and minutely address any issue.

VMware introduced quite a good chunk of innovations this time: performance has been improved dramatically, memory pre-copy technology completely re-architected. But the true novelty lies in new Enhanced vMotion Capabilities (EVC) for GPU, making it a real powerhouse for intense workloads (graphic software, ML/DL-workloads, etc.)

With cybersecurity nowadays, you can never be too sure. And having to maintain it at scale can prove quite straining. Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native software imbued with AI functions, can help simplify that process for you. Have a birds-eye view of your entire HCI via a convenient dashboard and benefit from Microsoft’s years of cyber intelligence experience.

We’ve saved you a lot of time, effort, and frustration by compiling all the essential steps to take if you want to upgrade from Horizon series 7.x to Horizon 2006. The article covers the compatibility matrix, which features to uninstall before proceeding with the upgrade, what backup precautions to perform, and all the other good stuff.

Among other exciting things, VMworld 2020 also presented project Monterey, which is to be based on a new type of network interface controller (NIC) — SmartNIC. This new NIC rendition will include DPU (data processing unit) capabilities by using different approaches. The idea is to make more server resources available by offloading a set of workloads onto SmartNIC.

Storage performance testing isn’t something one should take lightly, and VMware admins know this like any other. There are way too many tools to choose from, and you have no guarantee that you will get what you need. Or, at least, it used to be so, until VMware has released a new tool, Storage Performance Tester.

Dell markets its EMC OpenManage extension for Windows Admin Center as a unified solution for ensuring Azure Stack HCI updates and compliance. Unfortunately, that is not the case since Dell’s extension is not in line with the current Azure hardware and software compliance matrix, and it’s not in tune with the latest WAC versions.

As time goes on, fewer and fewer people tend to rely on cumbersome SANs. It doesn’t mean that they have become obsolete; it’s just that many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) simply don’t require all the broad specter of services and resources that a storage area network system can offer. That makes perfect sense: if you can farewell with a less complicated and resource-hungry configuration – why pay more? Virtual SANs have become the newfound Holy Grail of small infrastructures. And why not? They offer software-defined storage solutions that support HCI systems and leave external shared storage out of the picture. An introduction of virtual SAN solutions to the market has changed a lot, opening the way for simple storage configurations that can provide maximum possible performance with minimum possible resources required, respectively. Since the market has emerged, it didn’t take long to recognize the leaders, which are StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) and VMware virtual SAN (vSAN). All else being equal, neither is considered better or worse. However, each IT environment is, in a way, unique. I don’t need to tell you about the multitude of configurations out there. So, with the diversity of HCI systems and hardware requirements in mind, this begets a question: are these solutions really giving away an equal performance, all things considered?