Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

As any other admin, you know that the VMs eventually start to suffer from disruptions, performance problems, or simply stop responding. That is a fact of life, unfortunately. Chances are, as a virtualization engineer, you’ve probably already met these problems at least once. And since the virtualized environment is quite a complicated system, there can be too many different reasons or factors that impact poor VM performance. Trying to find out what is wrong can take a lot of your time.

In the previous parts, we talked about general cybersecurity boundaries and staff education on the topic. The third crucial aspect is preparation, which allows minimizing the aftermaths if a cyber-attack does happen. Backups and crisis planning are two key activities that you have to manage so that you can effectively recover in case your cybersecurity is compromised.

Everybody knows Microsoft is one of the flagships of industry, and as an enterprise with such a reputation, they intend to keep it up. Yet another new upgrade shows how you can find out for yourself in practice what new can offer Active Directory Federation Services for Windows Server 2019!

For any business person, unplanned service disruptions and data center outages are the worst nightmares. However, while a lot may perceive such thing as inevitable natural disasters, Microsoft offers two excellent replication options to support disaster recovery and business continuity strategies – Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

High availability of Hyper-V VMs can be achieved through various means, one of them being Hyper-V Replica. The way it works is creating and maintaining copies of especially important (business-wise) VMs in a secondary site such as, say, backup data center. This solution is fault-tolerant so that even a loss of the whole data center won’t reflect on your VMs. However, an option like this is far from perfect because, for one, how many enterprises can simply afford a secondary data center? What if there isn’t one, but fault tolerance is still required on the platform level?

Every admin knows that however perfect an environment may be, it’s bound to encounter certain problems along the way. One of the most confusing issues for a VMware vSphere admin is VMware ESXi hosts in vCenter Server being nor responding since there can be too many different reasons. Luckily, you have a chance now to find out the most common ones and means to deal with them!

Although you still won’t be able to install Veeam on Linux and the new Linux proxy won’t be superior to Windows Proxy in performance, there are certain benefits to consider still. For example, Linux has a smaller disk footprint, it doesn’t need a license, and it can act as a gateway server. Subsequently, there will be easier ways to maneuver within you backup.

There isn’t always time or reason to remake data into convenient presentations, complications, and other content. Sometimes, you just need to get the job done quickly and effectively. Microsoft has thought about it and, now, you can easily control what you share, who receives your data, and on what terms with a single tool.

Nothing in life comes for free and, certainly, not all the little things used in Azure. Such components as RD Broker or RD Web Access, for example, are “hidden.” You won’t see their apparent activity in Azure Portal, unlike the RD Host Session or Windows 10 VMs. As a result, your Azure credit will be spent without you actually using the productivity of such VMs.

As of today, there’s no doubt of virtualization being the most discussed and developed aspect in the modern IT sphere. Therefore, engineers nowadays face more and more tasks that require quite specific knowledge, and there’s no way to avoid that. Case in point: just lately, I had to transform a few Windows Server 2016 R2 bare-metal servers (one of them was the domain controller) into VMs. UEFI served as a boot sector for every single one of them, which, as you can guess, was another obstacle.