Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Many years ago, I wrote a white paper on how to configure a VEEAM Off-host backup proxy server for backing up a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster that uses a hardware VSS provider with VEEAM Backup & Replication 7.0.  It has aged well and you can still use it as a guide to set it all up. But in this article, I revisit the use of a hardware VSS provider dedicated specifically to some changes in Windows Server 2016 and its use by Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5 or later. The information here is valid for any good hardware VSS provider like the one VSAN from StarWind provides (see Do I need StarWind Hardware VSS provider?)

Microsoft operating systems and server applications are becoming increasingly dependent on proper time synchronization. A skewed system clock can affect your ability to log on, can cause problems with mail flow in Exchange, and be the source of a great many difficult-to-locate problems. To compound matters, the default method of handling time synchronization within a Windows network isn’t exactly reliable or even predictable. If a Hyper-V host’s clock becomes out of sync, it usually affects all of its virtual machines, sometimes catastrophically. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much work to get everything in sync.

Why do I need to use complicated ways to access my files that are located on company’s server or in my homelab, for example? I want to ask the same question in order to make remote files available for my local applications without any extra actions. The answer, as well as the solution to the problems listed above, lies in the next four words – Network File System protocol. I’d like to start with the general description of the NFS technology and some background about its purpose, and how it was created. The story goes back to middle 80’s when, alongside with the Van Halen’s new “1984” album, the company named Sun Microsystems created a Network File System protocol. It allowed users to access some files from the servers over a network, just like if these files were located on users’ machines.

Here is the second article of 2 for the Azure Site Recovery implementation with ARM:

1. Preparation of the environment (Part 1)
2. Start the replication and Failover/Failback

Today we will see how to implement a DRP solution, with Azure Site Recovery. I’ll deploy this solution, based on the ARM. ASR can be used to migrate your VMs to Azure, from VMWare to Azure, etc. In my DRP plan, the service that I defined as critical for my business is a website. I’ll replicate this VM on Azure, with ASR. You can do the same work with a multi-tier application. In my architecture, I have a VPN S2S to Azure. Attached to this network who is connected to the VPN, I have a second domain controller, who is acting as DNS.

In the previous blog post, I’ve walked you thru the process of creating the Windows Server 2016 Failover Cluster  (WSFC) that is not joined to an Active Directory Domain. It is very important that you get the underlying WSFC properly configured and stabilized before you even attempt to create the SQL Server 2016 Always On Basic Availability Group. The availability and reliability of your SQL Server 2016 Always On Basic Availability Group depends so much on the WSFC.

Managing user mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 is a day-to-day task of system engineers. This article focuses on managing user mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 including very common features like creating, removing and disabling the mailboxes with the help of PowerShell.

In Windows Server 2016 Microsoft introduced storage Quality of Service (QoS) policies.  Previously in Windows Server 2012 R2, we could set minimum and maximum IOPS individually virtual hard disk but this was limited even if you could automate it with PowerShell. The maximum was enforced but the minimum not. That only logged a warning if it could be delivered and it took automation that went beyond what was practical for many administrators when it needed to be done at scale. While it was helpful and I used it in certain scenarios it needed to mature to deliver real value and offer storage QoS in environments where cost-effective, highly available storage was used that often doesn’t include native QoS capabilities for use with Hyper-V.

We have been talking on this blog before about the importance Microsoft and the rest of cloud providers are giving to security features and products in the last couple of years. The well-known security incidents present in the industry just in 2017 generated to companies billions in a loss, hence a large number of releases from Microsoft to face these incidents and, above all, provide calm to their customers around the cloud. Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) combines several of the latest security enhancements. In this article, we will review how to connect the ATA platform to Azure, guaranteeing a reliable monitoring.