Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

A Kemp LoadMaster appliance is a critical service for load balancing and application content delivery. Thanks to flexible deployment options for a wide range of hypervisors and cloud platforms, Kemp LoadMaster allows you to distribute user traffic and improve application performance in private and hybrid cloud systems intelligently and efficiently. At the same time, usually Kemp is in front of critical services such as E-mail, web applications, SharePoint and if you lose it, you’ll get service outage. Deploying an HA cluster will solve this problem and provide a high availability, especially for a physical appliance!

If you are new to VMware or just starting out in the tech, you may feel a bit confused about products naming. Well, at least I was. There are tons of products in the suite so many have a hard time grasping how all those things come together. For instance, it may be hard for a beginner to tell apart ESXi and vSphere. What should you do? Well, nothing special, you know. Google. Ask fellow admins. Look through forums. Read books. Well, my post is not here to bring you from the very beginning to finish. It’s rather a long process, and you need to pay your dues sometimes. Honestly, I got some knowledge only through fixing things that I had messed up. This post covers some questions that popped out in my head when I was only starting. And, my case is not unique. So, let’s start with VMware!

Migration of virtual machines is an important feature of virtualization technology that allows applications to move transparently along with their runtime environments between physical machines. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) allows the migration of one or multiple on-premises virtual machines to AWS in an easy way from a single pane of glass. Plan, automate, and track step-by-step replication of running server volumes with just one tool — the AWS console!

From day to day, admins troubleshoot issues remotely. And, pretty often, they cannot count on another guy who helps them to enable Remote Desktop (RD) on the remote host. There may also be the case when you loose the access to RD on another computer for some reason, and there’s no one in the remote office who can help you. Whatever, I hope you got the point. What do you need to do? Sure, you can just ask a fellow admin to enable RD on the remote host and wait a bit, but what if that’s something really urgent and you are to fix that issue in the middle of the night? Let’s think through what you can do in that case.

Windows Server 2019 was released on the 4th of October 2019. This was a very expected and highly attended release of the latest Microsoft Server Operating System (OS). Microsoft has also released a new free utility called Windows Admin Center (WAC), which can manage your whole production environment via a web-based console.

Nowadays we often meet systems with RDMA connections configured for increasing the performance of the system. Also, it’s not a news that we can meet environments with the different OS installed. In our case, we will be looking into a vital aspect of the process – the performance of RDMA connections. So, let’s have a look at the configuration of RDMA and what we need for building and testing RDMA connections, problems that you possibly can face, and the final part is making it perform in a way that will make us happy. So, let’s start.

Kemp provides a product called LoadMaster that provides a load balancer. Load Master is available in physical and virtual appliances. The virtual appliance is also called VLM (Virtual LoadMaster). LoadMaster can be deployed either in On-Prem and in Microsoft Azure. Today I wanted to show you how to deploy a VLM and the first configuration steps.

Deduplication is a cool technique that some admins use when it comes to saving storage space. No wonder. By deduping, you can gain some extra storage even without deleting anything. Everyone seems to use it, but how does that thing, actually, work? In this article, I’ll look under dedupe hood to understand better its operating principles. Why one may need this? You see, you always can make the most of things once you understand how they work. I believe this principle to apply to almost everything! So, here’s why I examine such a common storage optimization technique as deduplication in this article. True, that’s up to you to dedupe or not. Today, I won’t discuss whether you need deduplication at all. Here’s a good article on this matter.

Does low latency, high throughput & CPU offloading require RDMA? What? Blasphemy, how dare we even question this? In my defense, I’m not questioning anything. I am merely being curious. I’m the inquisitive kind. The need for RDMA is the premise that we have been working with ever since RDMA became available outside of HPC InfiniBand fabrics. For us working in the Windows ecosystem this was with SMB Direct. Windows Server 2012 was the OS version that introduced us to SMB Direct, which leverages RDMA.