Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

IT administrators are always confronted with the problem of building innovative, fast, modern, and reliable IT infrastructure that fits the budget and saves resources for future growth. To commence, you should plan, select, re-plan, clarify goals, and so on ad infinitum in a vicious circle. However, the issue of guaranteeing the data safety will always be relevant on the agenda. Choosing a SAN (Storage Area Network) with the iSCSI protocol as one of the possible storage solutions will ensure data security and constant availability. In addition, this approach is cost-effective in terms of maintenance and support.

Let’s imagine a situation: a power outage went out and an incorrect server shutdown has occurred. Everything is aggravated by the fact that you have no power backup. What will happen to your write operations? They sink into oblivion and data will be lost. But StarWind says “no” to these troubles! Log-structured Write-Back Cache (LSWBC) is a StarWind feature which speeds up the processing of write requests and saves data when the server is incorrectly shut down. What about RAM caching? Your data also will be saved.

Do you know that not every solution requires high available storage? Sometimes there is a need in functionality that gives us the option not to leverage any OS caching. Precisely this UseWriteThrough option you can find in the New-SBMMapping commandlet in Windows Server 2019. It allows a user to disable caching with SMB mappings in certain scenarios thus giving a possibility to prefer reliability over performance in non-continuously available file share scenarios. So, always check “paper proof of concepts” and find the best options for your IT infrastructure and business development!

One, two, three … Let’s roll! StarWind presents an updated functionality of V2V Converter. The utility enables conversion of a physical machine into a virtual one (P2V) and other way around. For example, you have a server with Windows Server 2012R2 installed running some critical application. With physical-to-virtual (P2V) entire host or specific physical drive (or volume) can be migrated. What else? The pressure is on! Now your VMs can be migrated directly between Hyper-V and ESXi (and backwards). Moreover, StarWind V2V Converter offers bi-directional conversion between all the major VM formats: VMDK, VHD/VHDX (Windows Repair Mode aware), QCOW2, and StarWind native IMG.

VPN connections provide remote access to the necessary data and you can get information about your company’s assets at any time. The connection to Azure virtual networks is possible by configuring two types of VPN, namely Site-To-Site (S2S) and Point-To-Site (P2S). S2S VPN allows you to connect two networks and constantly maintain communication between them. P2S VPN is effective for connecting to a virtual network from a remote location if you have a small number of clients for whom such an access is needed. You’re asking how to establish a secure connection of individual clients running Windows 10 to the Azure Virtual Network?

VMware vSphere 6 offers all new and new features including a new VMware vCenter management services architecture. vCenter 6.0 can be deployed in embedded and external options and separately as a Platform Services Controller (PSC) and as vCenter. If the Platform Services Controller (PSC) provides common infrastructure services for the data center, then the vCenter Server ensures the remainder of the vCenter Server functionality. But you’ll agree, it would be great to have a common platform that combines both solutions. This option would help reduce the number of VMs per sites without any load balanced dependencies and provide fault tolerance.

VMware Tools is a handy utility suite that makes your VMs run faster and dramatically simplifies their management on the whole. And, the nice thing is, it installs fairly easy on your VMware VMs regardless of their guest OS. Today, I’m going to talk about VMware Tools in general and how to install the package in different environments.

Migrating sites to the cloud can be quite troublesome. For such cases, Microsoft introduced the Windows Site Migration Tool. This is a program that can collect the necessary information about a website hosted on IIS, analyze it, and then automatically transfer all settings, files, and even the database directly to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Make sure that the migration of the sites is really easy and can be completed within a few minutes!

  Some time ago, I wrote an article about backup storage media. Today, I’d like to talk about secondary storage. Before I move on, I want to clarify what I mean by “secondary storage” here, just to make sure that we are on the same page. Secondary storage is the storage where the actively used data resides. It can be both some local storage like SAN or NAS, or some public cloud hot tier. Well, it’s absolutely true that you can use disk arrays too, but let’s think of them today just as NAS-like servers packed with many disks, ok? That’s entirely up to you “which side you are on”, and there’s no “one-size-fits-all” solution. NAS, SAN, and public cloud storage… Whatever secondary storage you choose, it has own pros and cons. I discuss them in this article.