Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Sometimes, you need your VMs to access a LUN directly over iSCSI. Direct access comes in handy when you, let’s say, run SAN/NAS-aware applications on vSphere VMs, or if you’re going to deploy some hardware-specific SCSI commands. Also, with direct access, physical-to-virtual conversion becomes possible without migrating a massive LUN to VMDK. Whatever. To enable your VMs to talk directly to LUN, you need a raw device mapping file. Recently, I created vSphere VMs with such disks. Well, apparently, this case is not unique, so I decided to share my experience in today’s article.

Veeam Backup and Replication is a backup and replication product. The backup part ensures your workloads are protected against bad manipulation, ransomware or disaster. It enables to restore the data in case of loss. The replication part ensures that your workloads can quickly start again in another datacenter in case of sinister in the first one. Products such as Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere can also handle this task. In this topic, I will show you how to leverage Veeam Backup and Replication to make a disaster recovery plan. The same steps can be applied to Hyper-V or VMware but in this topic, I will take VMware as example.

VMware OS Optimization Tool (OSOT) is a free tool provided by VMware Labs website. A website which is well known for the “Flings”, which are free utilities which helps IT admins in their day-to-day administration tasks. The utility uses templates which provides an easy way to disable windows services which aren’t mostly necessary. By disabling unnecessary services you’re basically make the system run more “light” so you’re saving resources which can be used for other programs.

Security is typically a hot-topic due also to several regulations and compliant rules and laws. But more important, a security breach can have huge collateral effects, also if no data has been stoled, or compromised. But, for example, a “simple” DoS attack that makes a service not available can have a bad effect on the reputation of a B2C company. This post will try to give an idea of some possible security threads in a virtual environment based on VMware vSphere (but several concepts are quite general also for other virtualization platforms) and some possible approaches to minimize the effect or prevent the attacks.

ACI lets you create Linux or Windows Containers without the need to deploy a Container host, so in other words, ACI is serverless, and it works like a charm! So in this article, I will describe how to create a simple Container using Azure Container Instances (ACI). In the first part, I will describe ACI using the Azure Portal and the command line, and in the second part, I will describe Azure Container Registry.

I run a few small non-AWS hosted VM’s for things like my blog and email. These VM’s are typically run on LAMP stack style environments with a few customizations for monitoring and reporting that I like to run on the servers. Because of the hosted nature of the servers, I will admit that I did not always back up the content as often as I should.

If you ever worked with vSphere, you definitely used at least one of those. However, in HCX they are used with Secure Proxy. All migration traffic is proxied via HCX WAN Interconnect appliance (WAN-IX). Deployed WAN-IX simulates new ESXi host under local vCenter. You can actually see it in the Web Client inventory. From the point of view of vCenter and other ESXi host the WAN-IX is just another regular host.

VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is probably one of the most underestimated VMware products. Even amongst virtualization experts, very few people know what it is, and what value it can bring to the companies. The VMware HCX is a platform that erases borders between on-prem and cloud datacenters. It delivers app mobility and creates infrastructure hybridity across vSphere 5.0 and newer versions.

These days, hyperconverged solutions become increasingly prevalent in small- and medium-size datacenters. And, there’s no wonder: hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) provide decent reliability and set of features typically associated with large datacenters… but for less money! So, why pay more?