Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

From day to day, admins troubleshoot issues remotely. And, pretty often, they cannot count on another guy who helps them to enable Remote Desktop (RD) on the remote host. There may also be the case when you loose the access to RD on another computer for some reason, and there’s no one in the remote office who can help you. Whatever, I hope you got the point. What do you need to do? Sure, you can just ask a fellow admin to enable RD on the remote host and wait a bit, but what if that’s something really urgent and you are to fix that issue in the middle of the night? Let’s think through what you can do in that case.

Windows Server 2019 was released on the 4^th of October 2019. This was a very expected and highly attended release of the latest Microsoft Server Operating System (OS). Microsoft has also released a new free utility called Windows Admin Center (WAC), which can manage your whole production environment via a web-based console.

Nowadays we often meet systems with RDMA connections configured for increasing the performance of the system. Also, it’s not a news that we can meet environments with the different OS installed. In our case, we will be looking into a vital aspect of the process – the performance of RDMA connections. So, let’s have a look at the configuration of RDMA and what we need for building and testing RDMA connections, problems that you possibly can face, and the final part is making it perform in a way that will make us happy. So, let’s start.

Kemp provides a product called LoadMaster that provides a load balancer. Load Master is available in physical and virtual appliances. The virtual appliance is also called VLM (Virtual LoadMaster). LoadMaster can be deployed either in On-Prem and in Microsoft Azure. Today I wanted to show you how to deploy a VLM and the first configuration steps.

Does low latency, high throughput & CPU offloading require RDMA? What? Blasphemy, how dare we even question this? In my defense, I’m not questioning anything. I am merely being curious. I’m the inquisitive kind. The need for RDMA is the premise that we have been working with ever since RDMA became available outside of HPC InfiniBand fabrics. For us working in the Windows ecosystem this was with SMB Direct. Windows Server 2012 was the OS version that introduced us to SMB Direct, which leverages RDMA.

In this article, I discuss what VSAN from StarWind for vSphere is and how to set it up on the hardware RAID. StarWind VSAN for vSphere is a Software-Defined Storage solution that is designed specifically for vSphere environments. It comes as a preconfigured VM template, so just a couple of quick steps are needed to start running your vSphere environment on StarWind VSAN: download the solution, deploy it, and “play”. Here, I want to share some tips and tricks on working with VSAN for vSphere.

Sometimes, guys running home labs do not have licenses for Remote Desktop Services (RDS). Well, that’s not a big deal, you know, because Microsoft provides the 120-day grace period for the platform! However, one day the time runs out and RDS server breaks all the client connections. That day, admins are to choose between reinstalling the server and cheating a bit to reset the 120-day RDS grace period.

This article describes StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze as a solution to make local backup applications operate seamlessly with a cloud object storage. This all-in-one solution combines the ability of a backup storage pool to offload the backup data to Backblaze B2 cloud storage, and immediately retrieve it – all at a bargain price.