Many IT administrators or virtualization guys run their homelabs at home. It is a good way to learn new technologies, be able to break things in a lab to get stronger skills. It is sometimes a challenge, to squeeze as much RAM as possible from it. The main challenge is always a memory utilization. VMware VMs are getting memory hungry all the time and they are not “optimized” for Homelab use, but rather for production environments. Yes, it is the main purpose of those VMs after all.

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.

Thanks to the previous part, we have SQL Server 2016 installed and configured. Before running the SCCM installation process, let’s remember the architecture we are implementing.

As most of you are probably aware, Gitlab is, in part, a source code hosting repository which suffered something of a major outage just a few weeks ago. Unusually, they posted a very full and frank report on what actually happened. It’s very rare for a company to do this and even rarer for it to be made public, I wish more companies would do this, even if it was just an internal review with the blame put on the process, it would at least highlight where the weaknesses are in the infrastructure.

I am going to try to address a few issues I have seen quite a lot in my virtualization career. It is not that you have to take extra care when virtualizing, but your virtual environment will never be better than the foundation you build it on. The reason you do not see that many people fuss about it in non-virtualized environments (anymore). I believe, that resources are in abundance today. Well, they were so ten years ago as well, but since then we have only seen higher and higher specification on server hardware. It was the reason for starting to virtualize. Do not get me wrong – Lots of people care about the performance of their virtual and physical environments. Yet some have not set them self up for a successful virtualization project. Let me elaborate…

Many Certificate Authority servers that were installed on Windows Server 2003 never got upgraded until Microsoft ceased the support of Windows 2003. Some of those are still out there running today. A massive amount of them got set up in an era when Wi-Fi in the SME market became very popular and CA servers were deployed to easily secure access to it. To be fair, a lot of administrators didn’t wait for Windows Server 2003 support to expire and made sure their CA was more or less up to date by upgrading them in place. That alone is something to commend. However, the operating system version only introduces the capability of using modern more secure providers and algorithms. It doesn’t upgrade the ones used by the PKI automatically for you. So many of these upgrade PKI servers are still using an old cryptographic provider, the “Microsoft Strong Cryptographic Provider” (SCP) and an old hash algorithm (SHA1) that’s been deprecated (see SHA1 Deprecation: What You Need to Know) or even banned.

Recently, it became known that there is a private, mysterious network stretching between London and Frankfurt that is twice as fast as the normal Internet. The connection, provided by a series of microwave dishes on masts, was completely secret to anyone but one company. Only when a competitor completed its own microwave link between the two cities, the first company revealed that it too had a link between the cities in order to get a share in this potential market. Similar stories can be found all over the world, but because these networks are privately owned, and because they are often used by financial groups trying to find an edge on the stock market and eke out a few extra billions, you have to investigate hard to find them.

After the first 2 articles on how to install SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016 Server Core and SCVMM 2016 on Server Core too, we’ll continue with the next product, SCOM 2016. I take a look at the article of Tao Yang to do this installation. My SQL Server is already ready, so I’ll not speak about this in this article.

Yesterday I saw a blog post in Homelab subreddit discussing what Intel NUC to choose. I have spent quite some time recently to choose the right server for my homelab expansion and I have considered a lot of options.

I was also looking at Intel  NUC as many other fellow IT professionals, but luckily last month I read on Tinkertry.com that Supermicro had just released new Mini-1U SuperServers – SYS-E300-8D and SYS-E200-8D.  I had some discussions with my colleagues and other people on Reddit and TinkerTry and I came to the conclusion that if you are aimed to run home lab for virtualization Intel NUC shouldn’t be considered. I believe SuperMicro is a new king on the market of mini servers for home lab.

Server Management Tools has been released last week in the preview build. This tool is available in Microsoft Azure to manage servers from a Web-Based GUI and command line. It is able to manage Windows Server 2016 Technical preview running on servers located On-Premises or in Azure as well.