Setting up a failover cluster is a thing that admins must do. To build such cluster, you need to configure shared storage. And, there are a lot of ways to do that. Today, I’d like to discuss how to build a Windows Failover Cluster using a virtual SAN solution (StarWind Virtual SAN) as a shared storage provider.
Have you ever heard of the possibility to run containers without a need to manage servers or clusters? Containers allow packing application code, configurations, and dependencies into a single object. Standardly for their run, it’s necessary to select, configure, and scale clusters of VMs. Now imagine that you don’t need to do all this. You don’t have to choose server types and optimize cluster packing. AWS Fargate is a computer engine for Amazon ECS that makes your work with containers as easy as possible. With AWS Fargate, you don’t interact with servers or clusters, but simply concentrate on designing and building your applications, and not on managing the infrastructure that supports them. Not bad, right?
In our support work very often we face different environments. They can range from three VMs to a hundred of those, with the number of nodes from two to ten. Today, I will tell you about the main features of Failover Cluster 2016, which are applicable to any environment.
In this article, we will discuss the split brain issue, and different approaches to prevent it from happening. The situation when communication loss between the cluster nodes is caused by network connection problems is called network partition, which can lead to split brain. According to Wikipedia, split brain is a computer term, based on an analogy with the medical split-brain syndrome. It can be a real horror for a system administrator to handle the consequences of a split brain.
Sooner or later every single IT guy comes to the idea of having some lab. There are a million reasons why you would need a lab: learning new technologies, improving skills, trying crazy ideas you would never dare to try in the production network, you name it. Even though it is a work-related activity for most home labbers this is just another hobby for many of us. That’s why people spend so many hours of their personal time building the homelab, investing significant funds into new hardware, thoroughly planning its setup, looking for a help in online communities or sharing their experience to help others. There is a whole universe of home labbers and I am happy to be part of this community. In this post, I would like to share my experience with 3 generations of home labs I have had so far and the thoughts about next generation.
VMDK file to LUN storage architecture has been the most usable scenario for years until VMware released Virtual Volumes in vSphere 6.0. In the case of an array with block access, own VMware file system – VMFS – was used -, and NFS was used for file storage. The array capacity was divided into LUNs or NFS-shares and presented ESXi hosts in the datastore form. Frequently, datastore is a large capacity storage housing numerous VMs. In fact, allocating a separate datastore for each VM is quite inconvenient and time-consuming in terms of administration.
These days, more and more companies need high-quality, reliable and efficient server hardware. Home labs used by enthusiasts and professionals in the IT sphere for software developing and testing, studying for an IT certification, and configuring virtual environments became popular as well. Small companies are also interested in cheap and compact servers, the production of which is based on a couple of virtual machines or networking applications. Supermicro company ranks one of the leading positions in server development for a long time. Supermicro products range from the Hi-End clusters to microservers. Recently the company released two compact servers: SuperServer E200-8D and its younger model – SuperServer E300-8D.
Design a ROBO scenario must match finally the reality of the customers’ needs, its constraints but also the type of workload and the possible availability solutions of them.
In Part II we will review the remaining improvements in vSphere Availability and Resource Management brought by vSphere 6.5.
A number of improvements that have been introduced in vSphere HA and DRS in the last several years are impressive. vSphere 6.5 continues this tradition by bringing new features into HA Admission Control, by adding flexibility with HA Orchestrated Restart and by enabling DRS to make more intelligent balancing. I will be trying a new format today. First, I will be explaining the challenges you might have had in previous vSphere releases and then I will show you how the new vSphere 6.5 HA & DRS features address those challenges.