Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

If you are a VMware vSphere administrator who wants to solve the problem of a low network throughput, Network I/O Control (NIOC) is exactly what you need! It’s a traffic-specific vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) mechanism of network bandwidth regulation that was firstly introduced in vSphere 4.1 in 2010. NIOC appeared when 10G networking was increasingly prevalent and became a real breakthrough. With this mechanism, you can ensure high network throughput and go with fewer network adapters in ESXi hosts. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

It is never superfluous to provide an extra level of protection for your data and privacy in management. The Microsoft platform allows users to register and manage their applications, have a set of identifiers, and access their data 24/7. Creating a user with Azure Function will allow you to secure your data and provide private access to applications. Ensure information privacy right now!

Some time ago, VMware released VMware vSphere 6.7 U1. You know, I am really happy to, finally, find some time to take a thorough look at it. vSphere 6.7 U1 is the most up-to-date version of this virtualization platform so far, thus it is good to know its new features to predict what to expect of the upcoming versions. Well, I guess that this article is kinda of a long read. Honestly, I could not make it shorter as I wanted it to provide the entire picture of changes that were brought to vSphere 6.7 platform with U1. I hope you like it.

There are many anti-spam tools. And they are pretty good. For example, better-known and reliable domains can be added to your whitelist. However, spoofed emails will always be redone because they represent legitimate business emails. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is a mechanism that will protect your email box and will allow you to get rid of annoying spam, ensuring verification of the sender’s domain. Stop spam emails right now!

After rolling out Windows Server 2019 and Windows Admin Center a month ago, Microsoft said that both were designed with ongoing popularity of all-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments in mind. This being said, let’s talk about the new multifunctional Azure Network Adapter! As you know, large workloads require good connections to VMs in Azure. This can be accomplished by using things like Site-to-Site VPN, Azure Express Route, or Point-to-Site VPN. Here, Azure Network Adapter comes into the play, allowing to connect VMs to the Azure Virtual Network just in one (or two) clicks!

In order to build your own Hyper-V lab in Azure, you need two Hyper-V instances. But, hey, why do we need Hyper-V Replica here? This technology allows you to shift a virtual machine from a server on-prem to Microsoft Azure for maxing out your services uptime. With Hyper-V Replica, returning your services back to the normal functioning becomes a matter of only a few seconds… Looks like a must-have for your Hyper-V environment, doesn’t it?

If you work with Azure close enough, you’ve probably have heard of Nested Virtualization. Yes, it is the feature allowing you to run Hyper-V inside an Azure VM. Why does one need that thing? Well, to build a perfect lab for demos, development, testing, whatever… without buying any extra hardware!

This post addresses Hyper-V live migration – the topic which any admin faces with at some point. In my salad days of working as an admin, Hyper-V live migration was a saving grace, so I decided to write an article about it. Live migration is Hyper-V feature for moving non-disruptively a VM from one host to another. Users love this feature for flexibility and absence of downtime. You can easily migrate a VM from one host to another and it neither idles nor has to be shut down. On top of that, live migration, when paired with failover clustering, allows building highly available and fault-tolerant systems. Well, that’s why these technologies always come hand in hand. In this article, I want to cover some live migration and migration wizard settings that ensure maximum performance of this process.

In October 2018, Microsoft officially launched the newest version of Windows Server – Windows Server 2019, and earlier this month it became available to the public. Microsoft is known throughout the globe for its excellent software products, operating systems, computer systems, and other consumer electronics. Windows Server 2019 is the first and the only Microsoft product that went straight to general availability without going through the release to manufacturing (RTM) phase. But, did Windows Server 2019 satisfy the customers’ expectations? What are its main features? Let’s scrutinize from every angle.