Lately I worked for a customer to add two nodes in an existing 2-nodes Storage Spaces Direct cluster. The existing nodes are running on Windows Server 2016 while the new ones are running on Windows Server 2019. So, when I integrated the new nodes to the cluster, it was in mixed operating system mode because two different versions of Windows ...

The firmware and driver’s management can be a pain during the lifecycle of an Azure Stack HCI. Some firmware are not supported, others must be installed to solve an issue. In the case of Dell hardware, a support matrix is available here. If you look at that matrix, you’ll see firmware and drivers for storage devices, Host Bus Adapter, switches, ...

The last time I talked about Rubrik, I presented the first steps to protect vSphere VM and store backup within the appliance. Today, I would like to present how to archive Rubrik backup in Microsoft Azure. Rubrik provides a turnkey interface. It’s the same thing for archival. All you need is a blob storage account in Microsoft Azure. Then you ...

For most of the companies, the patch management is a challenge. All customers don’t have SCCM. And WSUS is aging and is not agile (you have to create several GPOs to handle different patch windows). This is why Azure Update Management is welcome to replace this tool. If you do only Azure Update Management in your automation account, the solution ...

Rubrik is a new competitor on the backup market. Instead of providing only software as most of the other products such as Veeam or Commvault, Rubrik provides also the hardware and so that is a backup appliance software. That is a turnkey solution where you don’t need to handle the underlying hardware and software. All you have to do is ...

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 ...