Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

As you know, there is no shortage of technologies to establish the connection of external peripheral devices. Still, while such options as FireWire or Thunderbolt already had their finest hour, USB remains the most popular choice, and USB support in VMware vSphere allows its users to maintain high-speed connections to servers, hypervisor, and virtual machines (VMs)!

There was a race to bring NVMe-oF to Windows some time ago. Many tried, but I know that only StarWind and Chelsio succeeded so far. Now, it’s time to see who won this race! It is the fourth part of my NVMe-oF Initiators’ performance study. Before, I tested NVMe-oF initiators developed by Linux, Chelsio and StarWind. Here, the battle ends: which NVMe-oF initiator delivers the highest performance and which one Windows admins should use

Even the least experienced users know a few things vital for an undisrupted working process if they are dealing with VMware vSphere infrastructure, one of those things being patching. Back in the good old days, risks of cyber threats were something that happens to people in the movies, but today you won’t go very far without security patches. Keep your environment up to date with patching VMware vCenter Server Appliance!

In times of need, a web framework comes really in hand, since it allows automating web applications running processes as much as it is possible, but there is always a fly in the ointment. In this case, it is an amount of resource required to access re-usable modules which any web site may need. However, unlike a lot of its counterparts, Django web framework provides you with connection and enabling these modules on as needed basis!

It goes without saying that hard disk drives (HDDs) are one of the most common storage medium to date. Data centers, home labs, and PCs have them inside. No wonders, HDDs offer unmatched capacity for moderate costs per GB. Let’s take a closer look at how to choose an HDD. This article is going to be pretty much a long read, but there’s a flow chart in the end that helps to make your choice.

If your organization is working with a cloud-only environment, there is hardly a necessity to tell you about managed domains and their benefits for an IT infrastructure. However, what can get your attention, is a possibility to deploy a managed domain without a need to deploy virtual machines (VMs) first, which is precisely what Azure offers with a new server role in Active Directory!

Finally, I got the hands-on experience with StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator. I read that StarWind did a lot of work to bring NVMe-oF to Windows (it’s basically the first solution of its kind), so it’s quite interesting for me to see how their initiator works! In today’s post, I measure the performance of NVMe drive presented over Linux SPDK NVMe-oF Target while talking to it over StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator.

One of the primary benefits of operating in a virtualized environment is granting remote access to distant users. However, in the age of digital crime being on the rise, it is not as safe as we would want it to be. Luckily, Azure users don’t have to lose sleep over security issue anymore. With Just in Time VM Access, you can automatize configuring the NSGs to allow inbound traffic to the requested port.

By default, if you want to deploy a VM on Azure with Terraform, you must give the username and password in clear in the variable file (see my previous article). But a solution exists, to secure all this. Just use an Azure Keyvault.