Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

Everyone knows that, currently, the SSDs are one of the best storage devices that allow you to upgrade your architecture and significantly accelerate the performance of the computer. SSD accelerates the loading speed of your PC, applications opening and files searching speed, and generally increases the performance of your system. Despite the fact that solid-state drives are more expensive than standard hard drives, the performance improvement can hardly be overlooked.

To the extent that the trade press covers, meaningfully, the issues around digital information processing and technology, it tends to focus rather narrowly on the latter:  infrastructure.  The latest hardware innovation — the fastest processor, the slickest server, the most robust hyper-converged infrastructure appliance — tends to be the shiny new thing, hogging the coverage.

There are lots of posts regarding Hyper-V networking. But there doesn’t seem to be a single compiled and up to date guide covering fundamentals and some advanced topics alike. This article aims to fill that gap, without a wall of text but a few easy to understand diagrams, tables, and PowerShell snippets. We will take a look at Hyper-V’s basic networking concept, NIC teaming (Network Interface Card) and different approaches to let VMs (Virtual Machines) talk to specific VLANs or even VLAN trunks. The first article in the Hyper-V Networking 101 series will cover everything you need to know about virtual switches and NICs. The last post is planned as a real-world example: A way to implement a secure Wi-Fi (and/or wired) guest network on top of a virtual firewall.

Veeam Backup Entreprise Manager is an optional component that enables to consolidate several Veeam Backup & Replication server through a single pane of glass. Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager provides a web-based interface to centrally control and manage all jobs. You can edit job, monitor them and have a consolidated view of the reporting of all Veeam Backup & Replication server. In this topic, we’ll see how to configure Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.