Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Being a sysadmin often means doing some boring stuff on a daily basis. Well, sure, you can use PowerCLI to save yourself the hassle. It’s a powerful tool that I believe any vSphere admin should master at some point. While PowerCLI provides you the ultimate freedom of IT infrastructure management, there’s still a workaround to automate some tasks even through GUI. For instance, you need, let’s say, to take a VM snapshot regularly, but you cannot write a script for that purpose yet. You still can automate that process and some other tasks with vCenter Server inbuilt task scheduler. No vCenter? No problems, you can schedule some processes on ESXi! The only thing is that you may be limited to the guest OS inbuilt scheduler capabilities. For more freedom, you need some PowerShell and PowerCLI skills. In today’s article, I look through some tasks that you can automate with vCenter and teach you how to schedule them.

In Windows 10 Fall Creator Update, Microsoft introduced a new feature called the “Hyper-V Quick Create Wizard” which is very useful because you can create a Virtual Machine with the default settings and save time. Using this feature, you can create a VM with a single ISO file located on your system, or you can create a VM from the Online Gallery. By default, Quick Create will list a Windows 10 Developer Environment but you can easily add your own Virtual Machine Images from your local/online repository. In this article, I will describe how to use this feature and how to add a custom VM Image into your own Gallery.

Microsoft released a few weeks ago a new feature, to backup your SQL Server databases, directly from Azure Backup.  This new functionality is very interesting and is working smoothly for a preview. Adding of other databases types like Oracle, MySQL, PostGre, etc. could be very interesting.

  A couple of days ago, I decided to re-distribute VM resource shares. I, basically, wanted several VMs to get some more resource without compromising their latency. For that purpose, I played around with Storage I/O Control parameters a bit. And, you know, I decided to look at things more globally. Actually, here’s how I decided to take a deeper dive into I/O filtering. In today’s article, I’m going to tell you about the VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) framework providing the direct access to the to the VM I/O stream. I shed light on how to enable those filters, how they work, and why you need them.

In my today’s topic, I discuss why PowerShell behaves like that. Specifically, I shed light on why you cannot run scripts or access a computer on a different domain. Also, I’ll take a closer look at how some cmdlets work.

You’re on VMWare ESX 5.5, 6 or 6.5 and you want to migrate to Azure? Don’t worry, it’s pretty simple now, just follow this article. To start, you must run one of the following VMWare version, supported by Microsoft, 5.5, 6.0 or 6.5. After that, you need an Azure subscription to be able to migrate to Azure.

This blog article discusses Access Rights feature and its implementation in VSAN from StarWind environment. Access Rights allows you to segregate the storage between multiple clusters or hypervisors. You can configure the feature with StarWind Management Console, and, in this article, I’ll teach you how that can be done.

Windows Server 2019 should be available in barely two months. So, first migration will start shortly after. From experience, I know that the first feature customers ask for migrating is Active Directory. Therefore, I wanted to try In-Place Upgrade, which has been improved in Windows Server 2019. To try this feature, I upgraded a forest that is handled by two domain controllers running on Windows Server 2016. It was not a “click and fun” process, but Microsoft has really improved In-Place Upgrade. Let’s take a look at how to migrate Windows Server 2016 DC to 2019.

Persistent Memory (PMEM) support is introduced in the recently released VMware vSphere 6.7. This new non-volatile memory type covers the gap in performance between the random-access memory (RAM) and Flash/SSD. But, is PMEM really that fast? In this article, I take a closer look at what persistent memory is and its performance.