Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

Admittedly, Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that is friendly and useful enough for every business person. It provides a varying range of possibilities, including cloud file storage. However, these files are fragile, for even a missed click can become a huge inconvenience. It is only reasonable to go on further with exploring Azure services and learn how to protect your data with Azure Backup.

Today, I’d like to share some of cool ESXCLI commands for performing a good part of IT related routines. Sure, vSphere Client has a wonderful GUI allowing for carrying out most of daily tasks… but CLI is much more powerful tool once you master it! So, that’s actually why I share my “Swiss Army knife” commands here.

Since I’m done with measuring SQL Server Availability Groups (AG) on Storage Spaces and SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) on Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) performance, I can write the most interesting part in this series: performance comparison.

Websites serving a large number of requests or providing services require high uptime. Here AMP (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack comes. It performs a logical pooling of resources, distributing workloads across multiple servers. So, with AMP stack you receive improved performance and high availability (HA) of your services.

Managing several DNS zones is hard because the interface is changing with a provider, and it’s not user-friendly. However, you can leave troubling interface and manual DNS record creation behind and start managing DNS zone from the Azure Portal. Whether you are a Microsoft Azure user, or you already have a DNS zone, you can use it still!

Having a disaster recovery site is a must for any company. That’s why I wrote an article some time ago on how to set up Site Recovery Manager (SRM) so that it allows for creating a disaster recovery site. Today, I describe how you can actually create that site and migrate your VMs from the main site there.

Everything that needs to be said about the importance of project management automatization and workflow organization has already been said. You have learned how to create your first Azure DevOps build with a Terraform file, so now it is time to finally learn how to automatize your Terraform resource deployment with Azure DevOps.

Project management and automatized workflow are the milestones of any business, but small companies often have neither resources nor the experience to build them from scratch. That is when Azure DevOps enters the scene! This guide lets Terraform users learn how to optimize their workflow with Azure.