Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

In this article, I discuss what VSAN from StarWind for vSphere is and how to set it up on the hardware RAID. StarWind VSAN for vSphere is a Software-Defined Storage solution that is designed specifically for vSphere environments. It comes as a preconfigured VM template, so just a couple of quick steps are needed to start running your vSphere environment on StarWind VSAN: download the solution, deploy it, and “play”. Here, I want to share some tips and tricks on working with VSAN for vSphere.

Sometimes, guys running home labs do not have licenses for Remote Desktop Services (RDS). Well, that’s not a big deal, you know, because Microsoft provides the 120-day grace period for the platform! However, one day the time runs out and RDS server breaks all the client connections. That day, admins are to choose between reinstalling the server and cheating a bit to reset the 120-day RDS grace period.

This article describes StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze as a solution to make local backup applications operate seamlessly with a cloud object storage. This all-in-one solution combines the ability of a backup storage pool to offload the backup data to Backblaze B2 cloud storage, and immediately retrieve it – all at a bargain price.

Sometimes, you badly need your ESXi VM data, but that thing just cannot be powered on for some reason! Well, you can try starting that VM one more time according to this article and access the data with a little luck. But, if you are out of luck and the VM is dead, you need another method to extract its VMDK file content.

One new announced feature in Windows Server 2019 is Storage Migration Service (SMS). SMS enables to ease drastically the migration from a file server to another. Moreover, SMS is fully manageable from Windows Admin Center as Microsoft has released an extension for this feature.

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.