Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Upgrading VMware vSphere infrastructure may seem a boring, tedious, and sometimes even difficult process. But that’s not true at all if you know about three steps you need to follow in order to avoid difficulties in updating. These steps are called pre-upgrade, upgrade, post -pgrade phases. What should be done at the pre-upgrade stage? How to choose the most appropriate upgrade scenario for your infrastructure and architecture? What steps should be taken after completing the infrastructure upgrade?

Azure Migrate is an Azure tool that helps to plan the transition from VMware to Azure. Are you considering the possibility of lift-and-shift migrations? Or maybe are you at an early stage of migration assessment? The Azure Migrate service will help you assess whether your on-premises machines are suitable for working in Azure, get size recommendations for VMs, and estimate the cost of running on-premises machines in Azure. Do you have any doubts?

Windows 10 Creator Update introduced Quick Create to Hyper-V, the feature allowing to create a custom VM from a Hyper-V Quick Create gallery image. It is a handy tool for testing new software or OS features which developers and guys in QA may enjoy a lot. This being said, I describe today how to create a VM template and add it to a gallery.

“Object with reference <vmname> was not found in the hierarchy cache.” Have you ever met such an error message during replacing the vCenter Server configured in Veeam Backup & Replication? Or maybe in the case of an inventory change in the vCenter? A similar message pops up when a Virtual Machine’s MoRef changes. To complete backup jobs successfully, you need to re-map the MoRef ID of protected VMs, namely to keep same MoRef IDs for all protected virtual machines. How should that be done?

Have you ever heard of the possibility to run containers without a need to manage servers or clusters? Containers allow packing application code, configurations, and dependencies into a single object. Standardly for their run, it’s necessary to select, configure, and scale clusters of VMs. Now imagine that you don’t need to do all this. You don’t have to choose server types and optimize cluster packing. AWS Fargate is a computer engine for Amazon ECS that makes your work with containers as easy as possible. With AWS Fargate, you don’t interact with servers or clusters, but simply concentrate on designing and building your applications, and not on managing the infrastructure that supports them. Not bad, right?

Each virtual machine (VM) is a collection of resources provided by the infrastructure layer, usually organized in a pool of resources and assigned dynamically (or in some case statically) to each VM. VMs “see” a subset of physical resources in a form of virtual hardware components defined usually by the certain minimum elements. Adding hardware components can be useful in some cases, or they can be necessary for performing some basic operations, like, for example, installing the guest OS where a video driver, a keyboard and a mouse device are needed to use the remote console. That is why you should be aware of which hardware resources can be hot-add and which hot-remove.

Since Windows Server 2019 release, the Internet is booming with its reviews. Someday, I maybe write my own one too. Till then, why don’t we focus on something more important than just listing new Windows Server features? In today’s post, I share the scripts for creating and formatting bootable USB disks for Windows Server.

VMware Horizon View is a VMware product that aims to improve the infrastructure of the virtual desktop as well as support bring your own device (BYOD) programs. Most administrators back up virtual desktops, but very few pay enough attention to backing up the Horizon View configurations. At the same time, a backup of a VMware Horizon View environment configuration is a critical part of the work of your virtual desktop infrastructure that guarantees its integrity. Moreover, if you any have problems with a large View Manager configuration that can last from several hours to several days, your Horizon View configurations need a safe harbor badly. So, don’t wait for a second!

An ability to back up and restore vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) configurations appeared back in vCSA 6.5. I guess that many have already used it. If you were unlucky to restore from that backup, you know that this procedure is not that straightforward. Bad news: In vCSA 6.7 Update 1 configuration restore process is still like that. In today’s article, I take a closer look at how you back up and restore VMware vCSA 6.7 configuration.