Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Well, hyperconvergence is certainly a good deal but there are certain factors to consider when choosing a hyper-converged vendor. Support is a number one thing you should be looking for. Basically, decent support increases chances that your production remains operational all the time or at least minimizes the downtimes. Unified management is the “core” of hyperconvergence, so make sure you won’t need any additional software for administrating your hyper-converged infrastructure. Finally, the price. Take your time and calculate if you’re not overpaying just for a vendor’s “logo”. So, there is a wide variety of hyper-converged appliances, but I hope these three simple factors will help you with choosing a vendor that will provide you with the one that will serve you faithfully.

Today I will deal with data deduplication analysis. Data deduplication is a technique that helps to avoid storing repeated identical data blocks. Basically, during the deduplication process, unique data blocks, or byte patterns, are identified and written to the storage array after being analyzed. While such analysis is a continuous process, other data blocks are processed and compared to the initially stored patterns. If a match is found, instead of storing a data block, the system stores a little reference to the original data block. In case of small environments, this is not crucial mostly, yet for those with dozens or hundreds of VMs, the same patterns can be met numerous times. Thus, due to the advanced algorithms used, data deduplication allows storing more information on the same physical storage volume compared to traditional data storage methods. This can be achieved in several ways, one of which is StarWind LSFS (Log Structured File System), which offers inline deduplication of data on LSFS-powered virtual storage devices.

So, we all know about Microsoft’s Storage Spaces Direct (S2D to put it simple) by now. It’s the feature introduced in Microsoft Server 2016 (Datacenter Edition) that pools together server’s storage allowing to build…that’s right: highly available and easily scalable software-defined storage systems. In this article, I’m gonna talk about not as much about its fault-tolerance characteristics themselves, but some hands-on experience, namely: how to replace a failed disk.

Veeam has released in December the update 3 of Veeam Backup & Replication which brings the central management of Veeam Agent for Windows / Linux. Thanks to this update you can now manage backup of physical machines or cloud instances from a single pane. In this topic, we’ll see how to manage a physical machine from the console of Veeam Backup & Replication.

If you have a single environment with only several iSCSI targets discovered from a couple of target portals, messing with automation may not be worth it. Yet, if you have multiple environments with a bunch of portals and targets that need to be discovered and connected, and all of them are more or less similar in terms of configuration, you might find your resort in automating the whole process. I hope to post some other automation things here, so tune in and check the StarWind blog from time to time.

Official Microsoft description: “Azure DevTest Lab is a service that helps developers and testers to quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. You can test latest version of your application by quickly provisioning Windows and Linux environments using reusable templates and artifacts.” In other words, Azure DevTest Labs is a great service that will help you to implement DevOps in your organization. Azure DevTest Labs will allows you to easily deploy Virtual Machines in order to test your workload in Azure. Setting up a development and test environment can take lots of time for your Ops Team.

Imagine you have a server with data source volumes that are backed up to local (or a share) target backup volumes with Veeam Agent for Windows (VAW). You might or might not backup the OS as well. That server is old, has issues or has crashed beyond repair and needs to be replaced. You don’t really care all that much about the server OS potentially but you do care about your data backup history! You don’t want to lose all those restore points. Basically, we try to answer how do you replace the backup server when it’s a local Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 deployment.

You all probably know that our main goal is delivering all the “building blocks” required to construct a full-stack IT infrastructure. This is ensured by a portfolio that has solutions for most business problems for IT systems. With the ever-increasing popularity of cloud computing, StarWind has recently created an easy-entry-to-cloud solution suitable for any businesses. It ensures that your data is always safe and readily available, regardless of outside factors. Before we take a deep dive into StarWind Hybrid Cloud, let’s overview common cloud deployment models.

Typically, snapshots are used to return a virtual machine to its previous state in case of any errors during updates or configuration changes. Thus, they will save your system from unpredictable failures. But please, do not consider a snapshot as a backup and vice versa! Let’s be honest, snapshots are not backups. Each snapshot is associated with a certain set of indices (or a single index) to refer other blocks on the disk. If the corresponding storage goes down, you’ll lose all your data because you’ll be unable to restore everything from a snapshot. Based on this, be smart and do not rely on them and use the proper set of tools for backups. In other words, use a hammer for nails and screwdriver for screws.