Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

In today’s topic, I’d like to talk about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. But not about the harm they cause, this has been covered widely in numerous articles, but how Microsoft patches intended to protect you from the vulnerabilities, affect (if they do) the hardware performance. Before we take a deep dive into the tests and numbers, let me tell a few words about Meltdown and Spectre and outline the testing scope to make sure we speak one language.

Find out from the StarWind blog article how to perform Check Disk on Cluster Shared Volume on StarWind VSAN with Failover Cluster ManagerSometimes, you can see an error in Failover Cluster Manager as “Chkdsk scan needed on volume”. It might happen due to some potential problems on a disk. To fix the issue, the system advices you to run a Chkdsk which is the well-known command for every system administrator.

There are various tricks and hints we all use to make our daily system administration routines easier. One of them is virtual machine cloning provided by VMware vCenter Server. Great and simple thing allowing you to deploy many identical virtual machines to a group – no need to repeat the same process all over again. This is usually done in vCenter but there are several other ways you can go if it becomes unavailable.

Many of us view Gitlab as something that only developers may use. Indeed, these guys love it, but are they the only ones who may find it handy? That’s time to dispel that myth! Gitlab is more than the cool repository for scripts of any size and shape. It is a feature-rich solution, so that won’t be fair to leave that thing on the table.

We all know what backup window really is, right? It’s an extremely short period of time that you are supposed to fit all your backup processes in somehow. Still, this challenge looks not that hard to accomplish as long as you are using that time wisely. That’s, actually, what Veeam Backup & Replication backup job chaining is intended for!

Fairly often, unexperienced end users get caught on some website which uses malware or newly some crypto miners which uses up to 70% of your PCs power to mine a cryptocurrency for some hackers. So how to protect at best those end users? One of the new ways is to use Microsoft’s built-in utility called Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG).The tool is designed for W10 Enterprise version only and the system has to support to run Hyper-V role. Microsoft introduced a new layer of defense-in-depth protection which uses Hyper-V for isolation purposes.

Regarding the growing demand on the cloud, it’s no problem finding a cloud storage provider. However, there are only few market players that can be considered true leaders of this industry. Amazon is one of these guys, with S3 cloud storage serving a perfect fit for any business regardless of its size. But still, even Amazon’s customers face several challenges during data migration process to S3, especially, when it comes to petabytes.

Now that VMware vSphere 6.7 has been announced and it’s also available in General Availability (GA), some people may ask if it makes sense upgrade to this version (or when will make sense upgrade to 6.7). Is a GA release ready for a production environment? Or is it mature and stable enough?

Protection Groups is a new feature introduced with the Update 3 of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 and allows the administrators to backup physical servers and workstations through the use of Agents. In this article will be explained the procedure to create Protection Groups and their use in the backup jobs.