Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Microsoft has introduced Azure Cloud Shell, a new way of managing resources from the Azure Portal. Within a browser, you can use Bash to troubleshoot and automate your most common management tasks. Support for Windows PowerShell is expected soon. Azure Cloud Shell will help you to store your favorite scripts in the Cloud.

VMware ESXi is the industry-leading hypervisor that is installed directly on a physical server. It is a reliable and secure solution with a tiny hardware footprint. At the same time, ESXi architecture is easy in management, patching, and updating. Recently, Mellanox has released iSER 1.0.0.1, the stable iSER driver build for ESXi. iSER is an iSCSI extension for RDMA that enables the direct data transfer out and into SCSI memory without any intermediate data copies. Here, we study the driver stability and performance to understand how the protocol streamlines ESXi environments.

As a summary, LAPS is the Local Administration Password solution from Microsoft. This software changes the local administrator password on a selection of machines on a schedule and stores that password in plain text in Active Directory. The first time I came across LAPS was when I hear about project Honolulu and I’ll admit that I hadn’t heard about it before which is something of a shame because LAPS is one of those very handy little add-ins that Microsoft should be offering as part of the core AD experience. For those who haven’t come across LAPS before, LAPS is a handy tool for scenarios where you need to change or set the local admin password to something random because you need to give out that password.

There’s, probably, no IT administrator who hasn’t heard of SMB3 (Server Message Block). is an application-layer network protocol, developed by Microsoft mostly to provide shared access to the files, and allowing communication between nodes. SMB has been designed as a tool for the creation of a DOS-based network file system, but Microsoft took the initiative and renamed SMB into CIFS later on (Common Internet File System) and continued further developing it. The second version – SMB 2.0, has been introduced in Windows Vista with a wide range of new features, thus it became clear that Microsoft was working hard to improve this protocol.

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: Preparation of the environment (Part 1) 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.