Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Having credits in Azure in advance is a great option that you choose how to unfold. You can invest in credits, allocate them to necessary features and tools, and set the billing. And to do that conveniently, Azure Cost Management is there to help. You can plan your finances, redistribute the billing, and see how cost-effective your choices are.

It is the second part of my research on SQL Server Availability Groups (AG) and SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) performance. Before, I measured SQL Server AG performance on Storage Spaces (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/hyper-v/can-sql-server-failover-cluster-instance-run-s2d-twice-fast-sql-server-availability-groups-storage-spaces-part-1-studying-ag-performance/). Today, I study the performance of SQL Server FCI on S2D, trying to prove that this thing can run 2 times faster than SQL Server AG on Storage Spaces

It’s usually quite a chore to manage file servers by using VMs. Migrating between file servers in the cloud, enacting replication with DFS-R, and such would require using redundancy mechanisms. All this makes the implementation of file servers in Azure unnecessarily complex. Well, that ship has finally sailed!

When people think “cybersecurity,” images will be the last thing to come to mind. Usually, users tend to focus on things like cyber-attacks, viruses, or malware. Well, regular images, depending on where they come from, their integrity, and the routing can become a micro-gap in your security which can then result in a breach.

Veeam Backup and Replication 10 has just recently been released, and one of its more exciting features is the ability to back up a NAS. The latter is frequently used for diverse workloads, which include huge amounts of unstructured data. It’s often served chaotically, and it’s in a risk of being lost if there’s no specific fast redundancy mechanism in place.

Each new VMware vSphere release introduces new features and functions in addition to fixing the drawbacks that may have been in the previous version. With each new one, you need to upgrade VMware Tools in all your VMs and check if you need to upgrade their VM compatibility, otherwise they won’t have access to the desired perks.

Bypassing conjunctions with public networks is easier said than done. Especially, if your endpoints are in faraway regions or even have different tenants, keeping the bandwidth high and cybersecurity tight can be an issue. Microsoft introduced Azure Private Link specifically for that reason, allowing users to create private endpoints within their virtual network.

As an admin, I’m fully aware that while working with the virtual infrastructures, plan A doesn’t always relay a guarantee, so you have to have plan B up your sleeve. Microsoft Hyper-V Replica inbuilt technology is a massive help in a lot of cases. If you want to find out more about why exactly this technology is a life-saver in the matters of Hyper-V disaster recovery, look it up here.

Content delivery networks (CDN) cover a set of network servers distributed across farther areas. The idea is to have point-of-presence (POP) servers in edge locations. That way, you can cache your web application content in designated servers to have your users enjoy it at high bandwidth. Azure CDN is one such tool that can help you with that.