Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

In the modern IT world, almost every tech guy, no matter a systems administrator or an engineer, wants his environment to show the best results that can be squeezed out of the hardware. In this article, I want you to take a look at the StarWind support of an iSER technology which stands for the iSCSI Extensions for RDMA. There’s not much of a change in the overall system configuration. iSER is utilizing the common iSCSI protocol by using the RDMA transport service that can be used on some network adapters with hardware offload capability. This means that iSER can supply higher bandwidth, intended for large transfers of block storage data.

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 has a pretty decent feature set to achieve cost-effective high availability for your environment and build a reliable disaster recovery solution. Basic Availability Groups (BAGs) and Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) are included in SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition and serve to implement high redundancy level for business-critical databases. In this article, I would like to discuss some differences between these solutions and open the curtain on how it can be done with Software-Defined Storage like Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and VSAN from StarWind (StarWind VSAN).

VMware has recently released VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO), a handy document that highlights the VAIO I/O Filtering technology operational principles. Here, we shed light on them briefly and discuss how VAIO can be implemented in a production environment. VAIO is a technology and an API providing the direct access to the virtual machines’ guest OS I/O Stream. VAIO is already employed in partner products for maintaining various tasks (i.e., caching write-back and write-through). VAIO is based on the Storage Policy Based Management framework, dedicated to managing virtual machines storages and set the storage rules.

Microsoft continues to invest and expand its PowerShell Scripting Environment but sometimes it is necessary to use a graphical interface in order to manage systems. This is the reason why Microsoft also develops a new management tool called “Project Honolulu”. Honolulu is the modern evolution of traditional MMC, first introduced in 2000. Now, it’s time to update our management tools! In this article, I will describe how to download and install Honolulu.

Since some time, VMware provides PowerCLI which is a set of modules for VMware vSphere. Except if you were in a cave last 10 years, you should know that PowerShell is a powerful scripting language. Initially, PowerShell enabled to manage only Windows Workstation or Server, but since sometimes, a lot of vendors make their own modules to manage their solutions (such as Veeam, VMware and so on). Moreover, PowerShell is available on Linux. For my job, I always use PowerShell. I’m a lazy guy, and if I have to make something two times, I make a script. This is the same thing for VMware vSphere. In this topic, we’ll see how to connect to vCenter and some commands to start.