Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

The latest technology allows moving as separate databases and log files and the entire system. In this context, speed, ease, and lack of downtime are critical factors for the success of this process. How to ensure them and not to get lost in a variety of options for migrating SQL Server databases to Azure?

StarWind & VMware vSphere users get unrestricted VSAN from StarWind features, storage capacity, and outstanding cost-efficiency. Using StarWind VSAN, the process of deploying VMs, providing fault-tolerant storage, connecting it to hypervisor, and creating highly available VMs becomes a “piece o’ cake!”. But what about software RAID configuration? How not to get lost in a variety of choices between the different RAID levels?

  Sometimes, you badly need to provide your VMware VMs with more RAM or vCPUs without shutting them down. True, there’s a trick allowing you to do that – CPU Hot-Plug and Memory Hot-Add. In this article, I’ll discuss both these features and how to use them in different environments. Why do I write an article about Hot-Plug and Hot-Add in 2018 even though they were introduced back in ESXi 4.0? You see, there are very few in-depth studies of how Hot-Add and Hot-Plug work in different environments for some reasons. Sure, you can find a bunch of good articles about how you enable those features, why you need them, and when you may just want to leave them disabled (yes, they are disabled by default). There were some studies held for Windows guest OS family, but there is very few known about how Hot-Add/Hot-Plug work in Linux. Well, I hope to fill that gap with this article.