Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

19 September 2018, VMware announced the end General availability for vSphere 5.5 – their probably most installed vSphere versions to date. But, wait, why write about it in January 2019? You see, some being misled by a title starting with “End”, think that it might be the end for the solution… WRONG! To overcome this fallacy, I decided to write an article that sheds light on VMware Lifecycle Policy and proves that End of General Availability is not the end!

In not so good old times of internet security being only at preliminary stages, the only protection measures available were wild viral applications all over the internet, such as Sandboxie. It is an app, designed to instantly close and delete all the suspicious content after finishing operations. Naturally, it was only a matter of time until someone has utilized it, which came to be Microsoft.

Quick Boot is another cool feature introduced in vSphere 6.7. Why does it deserve own article? Because, with this feature in place, rebooting ESXi won’t lead to restarting a server itself. By optimizing the reboot path, Quick Boot enables to avoid time-consuming firmware and device initialization processes. Looks really handy when all you need is just applying small changes or doing some update quickly, doesn’t it? In this article, I discuss how to quick boot a server and share my experience of using that feature. How fast will ESXi reboot with that feature in place?

VMware released its new vSphere 6.7 U2 update where vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) has acquired the capability to converge external Platform Service Controller (PSC) into embedded. In addition, it’s now possible to decommission external PSC virtual appliances via the UI instead of CLI. Embedded PSC is right up your alley! It not only simplifies the overall architecture but also facilitates environment patching, upgrading, and management.

Admittedly, the way of adjusting a novel piece of technology usually takes a few steps to make. The deployment and configuration of Windows Virtual Desktop are finished, but what to do next? First things first, you have to know the basics, in this case – deploying applications.

Application virtualization services, despite a lot of benefits, are not always able to rival SaaS platforms. Or at least, it used to be the case before the public preview of Windows Virtual Desktop. The latter is a desktop and app virtualization service employing simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, Office 365 ProPlus optimization, and RDS environments support. Learn how to utilize this novelty in a few clicks!

Some time ago, there was a post about new cool features brought to VMware vSphere 6.7 with Update 1. I forgot to mention one thing that appeared in VMware vSphere even before the update – PMEM support for your VMs. Well, I think it won’t be enough to write something like “Wow, it is good to see PMEM support in vSphere… it is very fast”. This innovation needs own article shedding light on what PMEM is and how fast your VMs can actually run on it. Unfortunately, I have no NVDIMM devices in my lab yet… but I still can simulate one using some host RAM!

In my previous article, I measured SQL Server Basic Availability Groups (BAG) performance. This, as it comes from the name, addresses SQL Cluster Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) performance. I expect SQL Server FCI to exhibit two times higher performance than BAG. Before I start, I’d like to tell you one important thing about this measurement. SQL Server FCI database resides on a StarWind virtual device. Why did I choose StarWind? Because I got their NFR license some time ago and decided to give this software-defined storage solution a shot. Let’s just hope that it won’t limit SQL Server FCI performance.

Veeam announced the next update of its backup app – Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5u4. It has an opportunity to create a Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR) with local and cloud extents. And one more benefit: SOBR can include two tiers. It’s not fiction. Create a performance tier and capacity tier such as a storage account in Microsoft Azure with SOBR!