Last week I wrote a topic about how to upgrade an old VMware vCenter Server Appliance to vCSA 6.5u1. In this topic, I describe step-by-step how to Migrate Windows vCenter Server to vCSA 6.5u1. To write this topic, I have migrated a Windows vCenter Server 6.0 to a vCSA 6.5u1. To follow this topic, you need a Windows vCenter Server ...
Read More »Step-by-Step: Upgrade VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 to 6.5u1
With the release of VMware 6.5(u1), lot of customers upgrade or migrate their vCenter to 6.5(u1) from older version such as vSphere 5.5 or 6.0. In this topic, I’ll show you how to upgrade VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 5.5 to vCSA 6.5. To follow this topic, you need to download the vCSA 6.5(u1) from VMware. Then mount the ISO ...
Read More »Enable Direct Storage Access in Veeam Backup & Replication
In environment with virtualization infrastructure connected to a SAN, you may want to connect your Veeam proxies (usually a physical servers) to the SAN to collect data. This configuration avoids using the production network to get data and reduce the backup window by increasing the speed of the backup process. This configuration requires a direct connection between Veeam proxies and ...
Read More »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. ...
Read More »Deploy Veeam Cloud Connect for large environments in Microsoft Azure
Veeam Cloud Connect is a solution to store backups and archives in a second datacenter such as Microsoft Azure. Thanks to this technology, we can easily follow the 3-2-1 backup rule (3 backups; 2 different medias; 1 offsite). Last time I talked about Veeam Cloud Connect, I deployed all Veeam roles within a single VM. This time I’m going to ...
Read More »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 ...
Read More »Host Veeam backup on Storage Spaces Direct
Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) is well known to host virtual machines in the disaggregated or hyperconverged model. But S2D can also be used for backup purpose as a backup repository. You can plan to implement a S2D cluster in the dissagregated model to host virtual machines but also to store backups. Because Veeam Backup & Replication can leverage a repository ...
Read More »RDS 2016 farm: RDS Final configuration
This article is the final topic about how to deploy a Remote Desktop Service in Microsoft Azure with Windows Server 2016. In this topic, we will apply the RDS Final configuration, such as the certificates, the collection and some custom settings. Then we will try to open a remote application from the portal. Deploy a Windows Server 2016 RDS Farm ...
Read More »RDS 2016 Farm: Configure File Servers for User Profile Disks
In the previous topics of this series, we have deployed the RDS Farm in Azure. Now we need a file service in high availability to manage user profile disks (UPD). To support the high availability, I leverage Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). For more information about the deployment of S2D, you can read this topic (based ...
Read More »RDS 2016 Farm: Deploy RDS 2016 farm in Azure
This topic is part of a series about how to deploy a Windows Server 2016 RDS farm in Microsoft Azure. In previous topics, we saw how to deploy networks, storage and virtual machines in Azure. We added also the domain controller to the On-Prem forest across the Site-to-Site VPN. In this topic, we will deploy RDS 2016 farm in Azure. This ...
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