Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

A number of improvements that have been introduced in vSphere HA and DRS in the last several years are impressive. vSphere 6.5 continues this tradition by bringing new features into HA Admission Control, by adding flexibility with HA Orchestrated Restart and by enabling DRS to make more intelligent balancing. I will be trying a new format today. First, I will be explaining the challenges you might have had in previous vSphere releases and then I will show you how the new vSphere 6.5 HA & DRS features address those challenges.

The network component and the troubleshooting that sometimes we need to do represents a big factor on all cloud customers, not matter if you are using Azure, AWS, Office 365 or any other. If you don’t have control over the network and/or you are not capable of identifying issues root causes, then there’s most likely the cloud experience it’s not going to be a good one. Microsoft has that clear and is now offering a new tool to assist customers: Azure Network Watcher.

In this article, we will not cover all the Exchange Management cmdlets but I will describe several examples to guide you in the right direction. In all Exchange Server edition, a lot of settings are configured automatically by the Exchange installation. So it is a good idea to explore all the settings individually to become familiar with your Exchange Server.

Microsoft announced the release of VMM SDN Express for System Center Virtual Machines Manager 2016 to simplify their Software-Defined Networking (SDNv2) deployment infrastructure. In short, VMM SDN Express is basically a VMM PowerShell script and parameter file that help you to deploy a production-ready Software-Defined Networking on top of Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition and SCVMM 2016, and without you having to move through multiple wizards or having to wait for a long time.

In the previous topic, we have seen how to install and update Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5. In this topic, we will prepare the environment. We will connect to vCenter to be able to backup virtual machines and we will add a backup repository. In my lab environment, I have deployed a vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 (VCSA). The VCSA FQDN is admin.vsphere.lab.

In the previous post, we have explained and described business requirements and constraints in order to support design and implementation decisions suited for mission-critical applications, considering also how risk can affect design decisions.

Since every computer now has a volatile amount of available storage located in the RAM, when compared to other direct-access memory used for data storage, for example, hard disks, CD-RWs, DVD-RWs and the older drum memory, the amount of time used to read/write the data differs in correspondence to the physical location and/or the medium used for reading/recording (rotation speeds and arm movement) the data. The implementation of RAM as a storage provides a list of benefits over other conventional devices, due to the fact of the data being read or written in the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the volume. Taken into consideration all the information mentioned above, it would be a crime not to take advantage of the provided conditions.

Veeam Backup & Replication is a backup solution which works for VMware & Hyper-V VM and physical servers (Windows and Linux). Veeam has many advantages over the other solutions on the market such as Instant VM Recovery, the easy graphical interface and the host-level backup for SQL Server, Active Directory or file servers. In this series, I’ll show step by step how to deploy Veeam, backup a first virtual machine and restore it.

As administrators of VMs infrastructure based on VMware Horizon 7 well know, the last version of VMware User Environment Manager 9.0 (UEM) solution provides an interesting feature – Smart Policies. This functionality allows customization of user environment on a virtual desktop, depending on various conditions, such as the location from which the user logs in.