Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Sooner or later every single IT guy comes to the idea of having some lab. There are a million reasons why you would need a lab: learning new technologies, improving skills, trying crazy ideas you would never dare to try in the production network, you name it. Even though it is a work-related activity for most home labbers this is just another hobby for many of us.  That’s why people spend so many hours of their personal time building the homelab, investing significant funds into new hardware, thoroughly planning its setup, looking for a help in online communities or sharing their experience to help others. There is a whole universe of home labbers and I am happy to be part of this community. In this post, I would like to share my experience with 3 generations of home labs I have had so far and the thoughts about next generation.

A lot of the time I see and speak to people asking about DR solutions when what they really want is HA with a few backups so I wanted to use a blog article to go through some of the technical terms used in conjunction with DR. When people say “I want DR”, I’ll ask them about the sort of disasters they are looking to protect against and most of the time the response is “I want to keep working if my hypervisor crashes”.

These days, almost every company that stores its own data on-premise, will it be the virtual machines, databases or just plain files, needs to be sure that this data won’t be lost due to some accident or human error. More to say, backup solutions are usually requested to be flexible, feature-rich and utilize different storage-optimization technologies for increased cost-efficiency. The additional requirement of the long-term data retention significantly increases the overall cost of the final solution, which resulted in an increased demand for public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Azure as a backup repository for their data.

I’ve recently covered in my previous post about Azure Stack being finally released to the Integration Systems (Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo). We covered in the article the clarification of what Azure Stack actually means, features and functionalities available. In this second part will go beyond, reviewing how much is going to cost, deployment alternatives, Azure integration, and the disconnected scenario.

In the previous article, we have created a free SMB3 file server. I decided to proceed with the testing of Microsoft Server Hyper-V 2016 free version possibilities. In this post, I will try to create Highly Available devices with VSAN from StarWind and then create a Microsoft Failover Cluster to make a Highly Available File Server. We are using 2 servers with Microsoft Hyper-V 2016 added into a domain (Hyper-V-1; Hyper-V-2). Client node with Windows Server 2016 (2016-client-test).

VMware Photon OS has been the latest OS used for vCenter Server Appliance 6.5. This is the latest move from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as VMware wants to own the Operating system (OS) and manage its development cycles and patches releases. Things that aren’t possible on Windows OS or SLES. That’s why VMware used Photon Linux and continues to develop Photon OS which is optimized for VMware platforms.

This series of articles will guide you through creating a free SMB 3.0 file server in Microsoft Windows Hyper-V 2016. Hyper-V 2016 is an absolutely free GUI-less version of Microsoft Windows Server for virtual machines. Hyper-V 2016 Server has been specifically developed and created only for virtual machines. According to Microsoft EULA, StarWind does not recommend repeating the steps below, because this process is a violation of the license agreement. The reason why we can create SMB File Share on Hyper-V 2016 is simple: all Windows servers require SMB 1/2/3 to work, and Hyper-V 2016 is not an exception. But it does not mean you should create any unsupported Microsoft services on GUI-less Hyper-V 2016.

In the previous article, we have covered the basics of Microsoft Windows Server Core installation. After configuring the operating system and specifying the networks and storage for the future configuration, there are few more things left.

When it comes to SQL Server database indexes there is a wide scale of variation in depth of knowledge on this important topic among IT professionals leveraging SQL Server power while not necessarily being specialist DBA. Let’s discuss SQL server indexes a bit here with non-SQL DBAs/non-DB developers audience in mind covering why and how sides of the subject.