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Sergey Sanduliak
  • Sergey Sanduliak
  • January 3, 2018

What’s Split Brain and how to avoid it like the plague?

In this article, we will discuss the split brain issue, and different approaches to prevent it from happening. The situation when communication loss between the cluster nodes is caused by network connection problems is called network partition, which can lead to split brain. According to Wikipedia, split brain is a computer term, based on an analogy with the medical split-brain syndrome. It can be a real horror for a system administrator to handle the consequences of a split brain.
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Augusto Alvarez
  • Augusto Alvarez
  • December 28, 2017

Step by Step: Backing Up Windows System State into Azure

Using the Azure Backup features for your on-premises platform is a great way to start introducing your organization into cloud services. So, if you haven’t explored the service yet, this is a good option since it should not be disruptive with your current backup process or any critical service you are providing. In this article, we’ll review a simple step-by-step process to set a System State backup of one of your on-premises machines to Microsoft Azure.
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Taras Shved
  • Taras Shved
  • December 27, 2017

Intel SPDK NVMe-oF Target Performance Tuning. Part 2: Preparing testing environment

In the previous article, I’ve described 3 scenarios for testing NVMe-oF performance and skimmed through their hardware and software configuration. Again, what I wanna do, is measure how virtualization influences the NVMe-oF performance (maybe, it doesn’t at all). For this, I’m gonna examine how NVMe-oF performs on a bare metal configuration, and on an infrastructure with Hyper-V and ESXi deployed. In each case, I’ll also evaluate the performance of iSER transport using LIO and SPDK iSCSI. Now that you have the overall understanding of the project, it’s time to move on to configuring our testing environment.
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Taras Shved
  • Taras Shved
  • December 20, 2017

Intel SPDK NVMe over Fabrics [NVMe-oF] Target Performance Tuning. Part 1: Jump into the fire©

There’s a common opinion that the performance in general and IOPS-intensive performance like NVMe over Fabrics is usually lower in virtualized environments due to the hypervisor overhead. Therefore, I’ve decided to run a series of tests to prove or knock down this belief. For this purpose, I’ll have three scenarios for measuring the performance of NVMe over Fabrics in different infrastructures: fist – on a bare metal configuration, second – with Microsoft Hyper-V deployed on the client server, and finally, with ESXi 6.5.
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Mikhail Rodionov
  • Mikhail Rodionov
  • December 19, 2017

Configure K2 and SharePoint Online integration

Despite I have mentioned in my previous article that setting up an integration between K2 blackpearl and SharePoint online is rather “a piece of cake” level of complexity compared to manual AAD integration set up the process, I’ve decided to write this article and describe this process from start to finish. Why? Because it is one thing to say that entire process boils down to adding K2 for SharePoint App to your SharePoint Online site through app catalog, and another thing to set this up completely from the ground up.
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Augusto Alvarez
  • Augusto Alvarez
  • December 14, 2017

Improving your Azure Experience: How to Create and Configure ExpressRoute Circuits

One of the main objectives for an organization moving to a public cloud, in any type of shape or form, is regarding the overall performance experience: It cannot be a downgraded version of what they have with their on-premises services. Microsoft is well aware of that, therefore created some time back the possibility to use private connections from your datacenter to MS Azure’s datacenters in order to guarantee this performance.
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Vitalii Feshchenko
  • Vitalii Feshchenko
  • December 13, 2017

Combining Virtual SAN (vSAN) with Microsoft Storage Spaces for greater Performance and better Resiliency

Previously, we went through the Storage Spaces configuration journey. The latest step was the creation of the storage pool and the virtual disk. Today I would like to proceed from that point on and create Highly Available (HA) devices with VSAN from StarWind on Storage Spaces as an underlying storage. The main goal of this post is to run the performance tests of StarWind Highly Available (HA) devices located on Storage Spaces created in different ways (Simple and Mirror). StarWind HA devices will be mirrored between two hosts via a 40Gbps synchronization channel.
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Nicolas Prigent
  • Nicolas Prigent
  • December 12, 2017

Azure Cloud Shell with Azure CLI

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.
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Gary Williams
  • Gary Williams
  • December 7, 2017

Deploying Microsoft LAPS

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.
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