Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

In my previous blog post, I covered SharePoint 2016 installation process, my next logical step after that was to configure SharePoint app catalog so that I can add K2 for SharePoint app and as I covered this process earlier on my personal blog, I expected this to be a small task. Indeed, I had created it following steps from my old blog post in just minutes, but, alas, I run into loads of warnings while running K2 for SharePoint AppDeployment.exe. I sorted most of them but after seeing extra warnings telling me that additional configuration is required just because I’m using HTTP instead of HTTPS I decided that it is better to re-create my app catalog using HTTPS.

In the previous blog, we established that there is a growing need to focus on Capacity Utilization Efficiency in order to “bend the cost curve” in storage.  Just balancing data placement across repositories (Capacity Allocation Efficiency) is insufficient to cope with the impact of data growth and generally poor management.  Only by placing data on infrastructure in a deliberative manner that optimizes data access and storage services and costs, can IT pros possibly cope with the coming data deluge anticipated by industry analysts.

Microsoft has just released to the public, and with a stable version (preview was announced in September 2016), Azure Monitor. This platform represents a set of features and capabilities within Azure to provide detail logs, metrics and diagnostic about the workloads in the Microsoft public cloud.

VMware has recently released an update to its main platform for enterprise virtual and physical desktops infrastructure management – VMware Horizon 7.1. More than six months have passed since the release of the previous Horizon 7.0.2 version, and a whole year since the release of the major Horizon 7.

Design a ROBO scenario must match finally the reality of the customers’ needs, its constraints but also the type of workload and the possible availability solutions of them.

Working with vRops over the last years has taught me one thing. The development of vRops goes so fast. Sometimes so fast that you do not realize when or what has changed. However, there are many “hidden” gems in vRops, which will make you and the product shine even more. So come along, as I will show you my top ten hidden gems of vRops…

On this blog, we reviewed a couple of times Azure Backup capabilities and integration with, what Microsoft considered a while back, strong rival: VMware (“Azure Offers Backing Up VMware VMs with a Freeware Tool”). And now they added one more interesting and highly valuable feature, Azure Backup will be able to support backing up applications in Linux.

Most presentations one hears at industry trade shows and conferences have to do, fundamentally, with Capacity Allocation Efficiency (CAE).  CAE seeks to answer a straightforward question:  Given a storage capacity of x petabytes or y exabytes, how will we divvy up space to workload data in a way that reduces the likelihood of a catastrophic “disk full” error?

It is quite surprising how many companies migrate virtual workload nowadays. There could be different reasons – expiring contract with the service provider, move to the new office, consolidation of resources to minimize Capex and Opex, but in every case, companies need efficient and flexible V2V migration solution. Very often people think of migration in terms of moving data from one place to another. However, migration is much more than that. For instance, you would probably want VMs to keep the same IP addresses after the migration. Which means you need to consider stretching VLANs between the source and target locations in case you cannot migrate all VMs in particular subnet in one go. You must plan a network cutover too.