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Tag: vsan

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Alex Samoylenko
  • Alex Samoylenko
  • May 11, 2021

VMware Cloud: What the Fuss is All About? Introduction

People working with hybrid infrastructures must know how tiresome it can balance the on-premises and cloud resources. If only there were an option enabling you to manage it as a single environment! Luckily, the new VMware vSphere release, VMware Cloud on AWS, has something to say.
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Vladan Seget
  • Vladan Seget
  • April 6, 2021

Identify basic VMware vSAN 7 requirements

More and more people turn to hyperconverged infrastructures each year because, well, they do have a lot to offer. Many people are starting with such well-known and admirable solutions as VMware vSAN, enabling you to replace physically shared storage. That is an excellent choice, but there are a few things you need to know before you start.
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Alex Samoylenko
  • Alex Samoylenko
  • July 18, 2019

Testing VMware VSAN cluster performance with HCIBench: How you do that?

It is not enough to build a functioning hyperconverged infrastructure because any IT environment needs to be constantly in check. Testing cluster performance is a necessity that requires the most serious approach. Hot news for VMware vSAN users is that they do not have to spend all that time and effort anymore since this efficient utility allows automating testing process carried out with such benchmark tools as VDbench or Fio.
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Alex Samoylenko
  • Alex Samoylenko
  • June 28, 2018

VMware Skyline – Advanced Technical Support for Large Virtualized Environments

For some reason, VMware Skyline is not common knowledge for VMware vSphere admins and VMware products users on the whole. Skyline is VMware proactive support technology allowing to provide advanced technical support for VMware vSphere products (including vSAN 6.6 and later) and VMware NSX. Soon, some other products will be supported. But wait, what is this service actually for? To make that thing clear for everyone, I’d like to shed light on VMware Skyline in this article.
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Vladyslav Savchenko
  • Vladyslav Savchenko
  • June 26, 2018

Secure your data for good with Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol

Today we will look at one of them – Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol or CHAP. Before we start, let me tell you a few words about CHAP. Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) is a network login protocol that uses a challenge-response mechanism. You can use CHAP authentication to restrict iSCSI access to volumes and snapshots to hosts that supply the correct account name and password (or “secret”) combination. Using CHAP authentication can facilitate management of access controls because it restricts the access through account names and passwords, instead of IP addresses or iSCSI initiator names.
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Paulsen Muzari
  • Paulsen Muzari
  • March 14, 2018

Whip your Hyperconverged Failover Cluster into shape automatically and with no downtime using Microsoft’s Cluster Aware Updating

Some admins prefer the Cluster updates to be done automatically. To do so, Microsoft designed a feature to facilitate patching of Windows Servers from 2012 to 2016 that are configured in a failover cluster. Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) does this automatically, thereby avoiding service disruption for clustered roles. In this article, we are going to take a look into how we can achieve this assuming that Cluster is built with hyperconverged scenario and VSAN from StarWind used as a shared storage. Before going in the steps to set the CAU, we will investigate this scenario.
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Ivan Ischenko
  • Ivan Ischenko
  • March 8, 2018

Simplify storage management with Microsoft Systems Center VMM (SCVMM) and SMI-S

SMI-S or ‘Storage Management Initiative – Specification’ is a standard of a storage management (surprise!) which gives you a chance to administrate the storage layer using ‘Common Information Model’ and Web-Based Enterprise Management technologies and logic. The main point of SMI-S is to provide a single standard to manage various storage systems from different vendors pretty much in the same way. In this article (?) we will show you how to manage your storage using SCVMM 2016 (Server Center Virtual Machine Manager) through SMI-S, and how this whole thing works in general. We’ll use VSAN from StarWind as a reference distributed storage platform, but the primary scope of this document is to cover the subject in general, so any SMI-S compatible storage will work.
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Dmytro Khomenko
  • Dmytro Khomenko
  • February 27, 2018

Storage Tiering – the best of both worlds

Before the time when SSDs took their irreplaceable place in the modern datacenter, there was a time of slow, unreliable, fragile, and vacuum filled spinning rust drives. A moment of change divided the community into two groups – the first with dreams of implementing SSDs in their environment, and the second, with SSDs already being part of their infrastructure. The idea of having your data stored on the associated tier has never been so intriguing. The possibility of granting your mission-critical VM the performance it deserves in the moment of need has never been more appropriate.
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Boris Yurchenko
  • Boris Yurchenko
  • February 20, 2018

Don’t break your fingers with hundreds of clicks – automate Windows iSCSI connections

If you have a single environment with only several iSCSI targets discovered from a couple of target portals, messing with automation may not be worth it. Yet, if you have multiple environments with a bunch of portals and targets that need to be discovered and connected, and all of them are more or less similar in terms of configuration, you might find your resort in automating the whole process. I hope to post some other automation things here, so tune in and check the StarWind blog from time to time.
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