Search

Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Featured blog posts

Trending topics you shouldn't miss

All blog posts

Every post, every insight, all in one place
View:
Alex Samoylenko
  • Alex Samoylenko
  • September 28, 2017

What is Veeam Powered Network (VeeamPN) and why you need it?

This spring, during VeeamON 2017, Veeam Software presented Veeam Powered Network (VeeamPN), their first solution in the field of enterprise networking. Veeam PN is a simple tool for establishing VPN between all parts of a distributed infrastructure: the headquarters, remote and branch offices, employees working remotely, etc. This solution is based on the OpenVPN technology.

Read more
Didier Van Hoye
  • Didier Van Hoye
  • September 27, 2017

The importance of IeeePriorityTag with converged RDMA Switch Embedded Teaming

If you read my blog on Switch Embedded Teaming with RDMA (for SMB Direct) you’ll notice that I set the -IeeePriorityTag to “On” on the vNICs that use DCB for QoS. This requires some explanation. When you configure a Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) vSwitch and define one or more management OS vNICs on which you enable RDMA you will see that the SMB Direct traffic gets it priority tag set correctly. This always happens no matter what you set the -IeeePriorityTag option to. On or Off, it doesn’t make a difference. It works out of the box.

Read more
Sergey Sanduliak
  • Sergey Sanduliak
  • September 26, 2017

Hyper-V VMs on an NFS share on Windows Server 2016 – is that real?

A few years ago, we have tried to place a VM on an NFS share. We used Windows Server 2012 because Hyper-V is a native hypervisor from Microsoft. Now we have decided to reproduce the experiment on Windows Server 2016. Just because of boundless curiosity 😊 So, we have 2 nodes: S3n11 serves as NFS Fileserver and S3n12 takes the Hyper-V server role. We will do exactly the same thing as we did before, but this time on Windows Server 2016 on both VMs. Let’s start!

Read more
Augusto Alvarez
  • Augusto Alvarez
  • September 21, 2017

While Dropbox Drops AWS, Hulu Welcomes It

Or should we expressed it differently, Hulu welcomes AWS but Dropbox moves away? I guess is still semantics, the information is the same. But the positive or negative connotation will depend on what service do you consider more relevant: Hulu or Dropbox. The fact still remains that Dropbox recently decided to opt for building their own cloud and Hulu is now one more streaming media company using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Read more
Didier Van Hoye
  • Didier Van Hoye
  • September 20, 2017

Forcing the affinity of a virtual NIC to a physical NIC with a SET vSwitch via Set-VMNetworkAdapterTeamMapping

Window Server 2016 Hyper-V brought us Switch Embedded teaming (SET). That’s the way forward when it comes to converged networking and Software-Defined Networking with the network controller and network virtualization.  It also allows for the use of RDMA on a management OS virtual NIC (vNIC). One of the capabilities within SET is affinitizing a vNIC to a particular team member, that is a physical NIC (pNIC). This isn’t a hard requirement for SET to work properly but it helps in certain scenarios. With a vNIC we mean either a management OS vNIC or a virtual machine vNIC actually, affinitizing can be done for both. The main use case and focus here and in real life is in the management OS vNICs we use for SMB Direct traffic.

Read more
Bogdan Savchenko
  • Bogdan Savchenko
  • September 19, 2017

High Availability and Disaster Recovery with SQL Server AlwaysOn: FCI quick walk through

Greetings, fellow sysadmins and everyone who is still wondering how to make their SQL server highly available! You’re just in time since I’ve prepared for you detailed guidelines with pictures and explanations on how to achieve this goal by using the SQL Server AlwaysOn approach! The great thing is that we are also going to configure and review the full-fledged system with the disaster recovery scenarios implemented. I’ve decided to break this topic into 3 parts. First, we will go through the process of configuring AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance (FCI), the next part of this series will cover the deployment of a DR site for our cluster using AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and finally, we will learn more about how to achieve the same using 3rd party software.

Read more
Mike Preston
  • Mike Preston
  • September 14, 2017

Consuming a RestFul API with PowerShell

Creating automation and orchestration requires taking multiple data center components which all speak different languages and chaining them together through one consistent workflow. Now there are a lot of programming and scripting languages that we can use as our orchestration engine such as Java, JavaScript, Perl, etc. – but one of the most common choices within the last 5 years has been PowerShell.

Read more
Augusto Alvarez
  • Augusto Alvarez
  • September 13, 2017

VMware Cloud on AWS is Here, Replacing vCloud Air

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are completing one of the most relevant partnerships around cloud services: VMware will offer their Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) capabilities within AWS. With this partnership, VMware finally replaces the already sold vCloud Air cloud services.

Read more
Dmytro Malynka
  • Dmytro Malynka
  • September 12, 2017

Nested Virtualization in Azure with StarWind Virtual SAN. Part 1: Introduction

At Microsoft Build 2017, the Nested Virtualization support in Azure has been announced. Now you can enable nested virtualization using the Dv3 and Ev3 VM sizes – not a wide variety, but Microsoft is going to expand the support for more VM sizes in the upcoming months.

Read more