Software-Defined

Replace vCSA 6.5u1 certificate by an ADCS signed certificate

If you are using vCSA 6.x, maybe you want to replace the self-signed certificate by a certificate signed with your enterprise to avoid security alert in browser. Active Directory Certificate Services is an enterprise PKI and in this topic, I’ll show you how to replace vCSA 6.5u1 certificate by a custom certificate. By replacing the certificate, your browser will not ...

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Update Mellanox network adapter firmware

Like the others, Mellanox network adapters should be updated to the latest firmware to solve issues. When you download the Mellanox firmware release note, you can see how much reported issues have been solved (usually, a lot :)). Mellanox provides tools to update and manage the firmware from Linux, Freebsd, VMware ESXi, Windows and Windows PE. Thanks to this set ...

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Storage Spaces Direct: plan the storage for hyperconverged

When a customer calls me to design or validate the hardware configuration for hyperconverged infrastructure with Storage Spaces Direct, there is often a misunderstanding about the remaining useable capacity, the required cache capacity and ratio, and the different mode of resilience. With this topic, I’ll try to help you to plan the storage for hyperconverged and to clarify some points. ...

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Deploy a SMB storage solution for Hyper-V with StarWind VSAN free

StarWind VSAN free provides a free Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solution for two nodes. With this solution, you are able to deliver a highly available storage based on Direct-Attached Storage devices. On top of StarWind VSAN free, you can deploy a Microsoft Failover Clustering with Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). So you can deploy a converged SDS solution with Windows Server 2016 ...

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Upgrade VMware vSAN to 6.6

Yesterday VMware released vSAN 6.6. vSAN 6.6 brings a lot of new features and improvements such as encryption, increase of performance and simplified management. You can get the release notes here. Currently my lab is running on vSAN 6.5 and I have decided to upgrade to vSAN 6.6. In this topic I’ll show you how to upgrade VMware vSAN from 6.5 ...

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Deploy a 2-node StarWind VSAN Free for VMware ESXi 6.5

StarWind VSAN Free provides a storage solution for several purposes such as store virtual machines. With VSAN Free, you can deploy a 2-node cluster to present a highly available storage solution to hypervisor such as Hyper-V or ESXi for free. When you deploy multi VSAN Free nodes, the data are synchronized across the network between nodes. You can deploy StarWind ...

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Deploy a 2-node vSAN cluster

A 2-node hyperconverged cluster is useful in branch office where you need high availability or for small infrastructure. With 2-node hyperconverged solution, you don’t need to leverage a NAS or a SAN for the shared storage. So, the hardware footprint is reduced and the manageability is improved because hyperconverged solution are easier to use than standard infrastructure with SAN. VMware ...

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