Currently I’m working on AZ-102 certification and I wanted to share with you a small lab I created to try Azure virtual network and especially remote gateway. To create a Hub-and-Spoke topology, you need that each spoke virtual network communicates through the hub virtual network. To implement this kind of solution, you need several virtual networks and peering. I would ...

In a Storage Spaces Direct cluster, the network is the most important part. If the network is not well designed or implemented, you can expect poor performance and high latency. All Software-Defined are based on a healthy network whether it is Nutanix, VMware vSAN or Microsoft S2D. When I audit S2D configuration, most of the time the issue comes from ...

Last week I worked for a customer who went through a performance issue on a S2D cluster. The customer’s infrastructure is composed of one compute cluster (Hyper-V) and one 4-node S2D cluster. First, I checked if it was related to the network and then if it’s a hardware failure that produces this performance drop. Then I ran the script watch-cluster.ps1 ...

Azure File Sync is a Microsoft feature released in July 2018. It enables to synchronize multiple On-Premise file servers with Azure. In other words, we can replace DFS-R for branch office. Azure File Sync brings also a tiering feature that enables to cache in On-Prem servers the most used files (based on the access data) and to keep in Azure ...

With Windows Server 2019 and Windows Admin Center, we are able to build hybrid cloud in an easy way. First Windows Admin Center provide a GUI to configure features such as Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery or Azure File Sync. With Windows Server 2019, we can interconnect an On-Prem host to an Azure virtual network thanks to Azure Virtual Network ...

Microsoft has released Windows Server 2019 with a new resiliency mode called nested resiliency. This mode enables to handle two failures in a two-node S2D cluster. Nested Resiliency comes in two flavors: nested two-way mirroring and nested mirror-accelerated parity. I’m certain that two-way mirroring is faster than nested mirror-accelerated parity but the first one provides only 25% of usable capacity ...

Microsoft just released Windows Server 2019 with a lot of improvement for Storage Spaces Direct. One of these improvements is the nested resiliency that is specific for 2-node S2D cluster. Thanks to this feature, a 2-node S2D cluster can now support two failures, at the cost of storage dedicated for resiliency. Nested Resiliency comes in two flavors: Nested two-Way mirroring: ...

Most of my customers try to backup their infrastructure at night to avoid impacting the user workloads. Sometimes there are so much data that the night is not enough to backup the whole infrastructure. Usually customers have a decent production infrastructure in term of speed and the bottleneck is the storage repository. For this kind of storage, we prefer to ...

These days I’m trying in depth Windows Server 2019. Today I chose to pay attention to Remote Desktop Services. The goal of my lab is to deploy a RDS Farm with all components and with the new HTML5 Remote Desktop Client. Even though I’m running my lab on Windows Server 2019, you can also deploy the HTML5 client on Windows ...

It’s been a while that Microsoft releases new Windows Server 2019 builds regularly. The latest public build holds a new feature called System Insights. It enables the analysis for the usage of some system resources such as CPU, storage and network and build forecasting. Moreover, in specific situations, a script can be run to resolve the incident. System Insights is ...