Software-Defined

In a previous topic, I have described how to deploy a VMware vSAN cluster. VMware vSAN enables to create a hyperconverged cluster in the vSphere environment. The last time we saw how to deploy this cluster by configuring, ESXi hosts, distributed switch and the storage. Now that the cluster is working, we can deploy VMs inside the vSAN datastore. To ...

If you read the news regularly, you probably have heard something about converged network. This is a model where the same network adapters are used to handle several kinds of traffics such as storage, live-migration, virtual machine networks and so on. This design brings flexibility, simplicity and is cost effective. First of all, this design is flexible because you can ...

As Microsoft, VMware has a Software-Defined Storage solution called vSAN which is currently in version 6.2. This solution enables to aggregate local device storages as mechanical disks or SSD and create a highly available datastore. There are two deployment models: hybrid solution and full-flash solution. In hybrid solution, you must have flash cache devices and mechanical cache devices (SAS or ...

Microsoft brings a new feature to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2016 called VHD Set. This type of disk enables to share virtual hard disks between several servers to implement guest cluster. In this topic we will see why using VHD Set, and how to implement it. Why using VHD Set instead of shared VHDX As VHD Set, Shared VHDX enables ...

Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 brings a new feature called VM Start Order. It enables to make dependencies between VMs or groups of VMs to start the server in the good order. Think about a complex service based on multi-tier as Active Directory, Databases, Web Servers and application servers. To start the service, you should start in this order ...

Before Technical Preview 5, Windows Server enabled to create Storage Pool with a mix of type of disk as SSD and HDD, NVMe and SSD or NVMe and HDD. Moreover, Technical Preview 4 brings multi-resilient virtual disk which is a multi-tier Storage Spaces (mirroring tier and parity tier). Since Technical Preview 5, Windows Server 2016 enables to use a mix ...

If you’ve been in IT for any length of time, you’ve likely gotten that phone call that you never want to get: Everything is broken! It’s the end of the world! The sky is falling! Your Hyper-V Host or Cluster is broken and you are the person to fix it! Where do you start? What are the most common things to ...

The last two months, I worked with my friend Charbel Nemnom on a whitepaper about Hyper-Convergence, especially by using Microsoft technologies. First of all, this document contains an overview of the IT infrastructure improvement in the last ten years past from before virtualization to Hyper-Convergence. Then we describe how works Microsoft Hyper-Converged solution by talking about Network convergence, RDMA, SMB, Storage Spaces Direct, ...

To manage the storage performance priority of virtual machines, Microsoft has introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2 the Storage Quality of Service (Storage QoS). This feature enables to set a maximum input/output per second (IOPS) to a virtual hard disk. In a multi-tenant environment you can set the maximum IOPS according to a service level or to avoid that a ...

Storage Replica is a new feature in Windows Server 2016 that enables to replicate data from the storage level when you are using Windows Storage solution. Storage Replica uses SMB3 to replicate and can leverage on RDMA to increase throughput and to decrease CPU utilization. Storage Replica implementation Currently Storage Replica supports four different scenarios: Stretch cluster implemented by using ...