Software-Defined

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

When you have few Hyper-V hosts and when you have not the System Center products, you have to deploy your nodes from a USB stick or from PXE services such as WDS. These deployment methods often imply manual steps to configure the operating system. However, it is possible to automate most of the steps thanks to deployment tools (part of ...