Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Anyone experienced in working with AMP stack on Ubuntu Server 18.04.02 realizes that this novelty, like any other, has its pros and cons. If you are used to convenient and useful Hyper-V enhanced session features, it may seem as though you have lost a shilling and found sixpence. Don’t worry, with Ubuntu Server GUI remote access you can have your cake and eat it.

Sherlock Holmes thought of the human brain as a crowded attic, where useful knowledge may simply get lost. Well, thanks to Azure File Sync, your IT environment won’t suffer the same fate. Find out how to synchronize data between file servers and Azure with this service. You can also enable tiering between file servers and Azure File Sync!

While extending a VMDK file is a fairly easy task that can be performed right in Disk Manager, shrinking a virtual disk is a bit tricky. And, you need to be really careful because unless done properly, reducing virtual disk size may cause data loss! Sure, you can just use VMware Converter to make a VMDK smaller, but, for my money, it is always better to have a script at hand. In this article, I’ll discuss how to shrink virtual disks with 2 simple PowerShell scripts.

VMware is not a newbie in IT security sport. Their work presents an impressive portfolio, with such solutions as AppDefense, vRealize Network Insight, and NSX-T/NSX-V. In March 2019, VMware introduced the first Service-defined Firewall, their endgame. Take a closer look under the hood to find out how it came to be a real game changer in the world of virtualized environment security.

NVMe is quite a promising technology that becomes more and more prevalent in IT environments of any size. PCIe SSDs deliver awesome performance, low latencies… still, they are far too expensive. Anyway, money, in this case, seems a problem of secondary importance. The main reason why many have not added NVMe drives to their servers yet is inability of this storage media to be presented effectively over the network: iSCSI seems to be inefficient for flash, so it is an issue. Solution? NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF or NVMf, how it was called before) – the protocol created to present NVMe flash over the network!

VM tools and VM hardware compatibility are vital for your VMs to run, but before updating it, you better be sure you need the features an upgrade can offer. Otherwise, it is a pig in a poke. VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1 (U1) sounds familiar? In that case, you will be interested in finding out what you can do with VMware Update Manager (VUM).

Hi, guys, I finally managed to finish an article on deploying VMware vSAN on the nested ESXi hosts. Some had difficulties with setting up the networking for this scenario, so here’s a guide on this matter from me!

Do you have a website with static pages to host and look for a cost-efficient solution? We have good news for you since Microsoft released a hosting on an Azure storage account. Azure immediately wins Adios IIS/Apache servers, because the latter are expensive in resources and maintenance. Don’t pay over the odds!

Setting up a failover cluster is a thing that admins must do. To build such cluster, you need to configure shared storage. And, there are a lot of ways to do that. Today, I’d like to discuss how to build a Windows Failover Cluster using a virtual SAN solution (StarWind Virtual SAN) as a shared storage provider.