Deploy Windows Admin Center in HA through Kemp Load Balancer

Windows Admin Center (formerly Honolulu Project) was released in April 2018 by Microsoft. WAC is a web-based management tool to help to administrate Windows Server and hyperconverged cluster. In part of my job, I use primarily Windows Admin Center for Storage Spaces Direct Cluster and to manage Windows Server in Core edition especially drivers. Since the release of Windows Admin ...

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Configure Dell S4048 switches for Storage Spaces Direct

When we deploy Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), either hyperconverged or disaggregated, we have to configure the networking part. Usually we work with Dell hardware to deploy Storage Spaces Direct and the one of the switches supported by the Dell reference architectures is the Dell S4048 (Force 10). In this topic, we will see how to configure this switch from scratch. ...

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Connect StarWind Virtual Tape Library to a Windows Server 2016

StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) is a feature included in StarWind Virtual SAN. StarWind VTL provides a virtual LTO library to store your backup archival. StarWind VTL eliminates the heavy process of tape management and also a costly LTO library. StarWind VTL provides virtual tape to store your backup archival. The connection between StarWind Virtual Tape Library and a server ...

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Monitor and troubleshoot VMware vSAN performance issue

When you deploy VMware vSAN in the vSphere environment, the solution comes from several tools to monitor, find performance bottleneck and to troubleshoot VMware vSAN issue. All the information that I’ll introduce you in this topic are built-in to vCenter. Unfortunately, all vSAN configuration, metrics and alerts are not available yet from HTML5 board. So the screenshots were taken from ...

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Use Honolulu to manage your Microsoft hyperconverged cluster

Few months ago, I have written a topic about the next gen Microsoft management tool called Honolulu project. Honolulu provides management for standalone Windows Server, failover clustering and hyperconverged. Currently hyperconverged management works only on Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) versions (I cross finger for Honolulu support on Windows Server LTSC). I have upgraded my lab to latest technical preview ...

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Deploy a Software-Defined Storage solution with StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN is a Software-Defined Storage solution which enables to replicate data across several nodes to ensure availability. The data are mirrored between two or more nodes. Hypervisor can be installed in the StarWind Virtual SAN nodes (hyperconverged) or separated from hypervisor (converged). StarWind Virtual SAN is easy to use and provide high performance. Moreover, StarWind provides pro active ...

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The cluster resource could not be deleted since it is a core resource

The last month, I wanted to change the Witness of a cluster from a Cloud Witness to a File Share Witness. The cluster is a 2-node S2D cluster and as discussed with Microsoft, Cloud Witness should not be used with a 2-node cluster. If the Cloud Witness fails (for example when subscription has expired), the cluster can crashes. I’ve experienced ...

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