Category Archives: Microsoft

Hit me baby one more time or the Faster Fast Ring of Windows 10 Insider Builds

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Hit me baby one more time!

This blog is brought to you by Francesco V. Buccoli, a brilliant ex Hyper-V MVP who went blue badge and became a PFE. Why? Because he called me a genius, that’s why!

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Here we go again, things are heating up in the last straight track towards RTM of Windows 10. We’re now getting build 10162 right on the heals of build 10159 that basically overran people who were still downloading 10158.

No this is not some PM in Redmond hitting the publish button by mistake again a la “Oops, I did it again” but it’s with intent and purpose. Deliver an awesome client right from the start.

So far it’s all good. The quality of these lasted builds, even during the limited time we get to spend with them, is very good and show real improvements over the entire line. Windows 10 should be ready for rollout at RTM/GA if the quality is this good and only improves.

We lead, we weren’t born to follow.

Now, go download it already and I’ll quit the cheesy music references Winking smile

Dell Storage Replay Manager 7.6.0.47 for Compellent 6.5

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Recently as a DELL Compellent customer version 7.6.0.47 became available to us. I download it and found some welcome new capabilities in the release notes.

  • Support for vSphere 6
  • 2024 bit public key support for SSL/TLS
  • The ability to retry failed jobs (Microsoft Extensions Only)
  • The ability to modify a backup set (Microsoft Extensions Only)

The ability to retry failed jobs is handy. There might be a conflicting backup running via a 3rd party tool leveraging the hardware VSS provider. So the ability to retry can mitigate this. As we do multiple replays per day and have them scheduled recurrently we already mitigated the negative effects of this, but this only gibes us more options to deal with such situations. It’s good.

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The ability to modify a backup set is one I love. It was just so annoying not to be able to do this before. A change in the environment meant having to create a new backup set. That also meant keeping around the old job for as long as you wanted to retain the replays associated with that job. Not the most optimal way of handling change I’d say, so this made me happy when I saw it.

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Now I’d like DELL to invest a bit more in make restore of volume based replays of virtual machines easier. I actually like the volume based ones with Hyper-V as it’s one snapshot per CSV for all VMs and it doesn’t require all the VMs to reside on the host where we originally defined the backup set. Optimally you do run all the VMs on the node that own the CSV but otherwise it has less restrictions. I my humble opinion anything that restricts VM mobility is bad and goes against the grain of virtualization and dynamic optimization. I wonder if this has more to do with older CVS/Hyper-V versions, current limitations in Windows Server Hyper-V or CVS or a combination. This makes for a nice discussion, so if anyone from MSFT & the DELL Storage team responsible for Repay Manager wants to have one, just let me know Smile 

Last but not least I’d love DELL to communicate in Q4 of 2015 on how they will integrate their data protection offering in Compellent/Replay manager with Windows Server 2016 Backup changes and enhancements. That’s quite a change that’s happing for Hyper-V and it would be good for all to know what’s being done to leverage that. Another thing that is high on my priority for success is to enable leveraging replays with Live Volumes. For me that’s the biggest drawback to Live Volumes: having to chose between high/continuous availability and application consistent replays for data protection and other use cases).

I have some more things on my wish list but these are out of scope in regards to the subject of this blog post.

Microsoft Ignite Here I Come

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Ignite is coming closer and I’m to Chicago soon to attend. I’ll be focusing on a couple of things. One of them is vNext, that means Hyper-V and everything that’s related the network and the storage stack.  The other is Azure and anything related to the above mentioned stack as well as identity/security.

That should be sufficient to keep me busy as next to that I’ll be having meetings with the Microsoft product groups and various vendors/partner on their offerings and plans.

The remaining time will be allocated to networking and talking shop with the international community. I’m looking forward to meet up with so many buddies from across the globe and dive into our beloved subjects. I you read my blog, follow me on twitter and you’re there, let me know. We can meet and greet!

Ignite

So let’s ignite the future of technology and prepare for our future as well. Remember, it’s you who needs to invest in yourself and your career. Employee, independent consultant or civil servant, it doesn’t matter, while helping others succeed, keep working on your own life long education and future.

But before I’m in Chicago I need to travel there, so we’ll hop onto one of those nice Boeings for a long haul flight across the big pond.  See you there!

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Quick Demo Video Of Site Failover With KEMP Loadmaster Global Balancing

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Here’s a quick video that demonstrates how you can achieve site failover with via the KEMP Loadmaster Global Balancing feature. As long as you know what this can do for you and realize that it about site failover and high availability and not continuous availability without a second of service interruption you can deliver nice results with this technology across city campuses or between cities.

In our scenario we normally connect to the primary data center (weighted round robin) and fail over to the DRC when the primary site fails for some reason.

It’s very busy at the moment but I hope to address this topic a bit more in detail in the future. All of this runs virtualized on Hyper-V and performs just fine.