- Why OpenStack is much more than just hype
- A summary of key OpenStack technologies
- Why to consider converged infrastructure for building private clouds
- The right way to scale-out OpenStack deployments
Watch the webinar here!
//Richard
Archive
Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’
#Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 1 of 7) – Introduction
July 7, 2014
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This is a great blog post series! Good job Cristian Edwards!
Hi Virtualization gurus,
Since 6 months now, I’ve been working on the internal readiness about Hyper-V Networking in 2012 R2 and all the options and functionalities that exists and how to make them work together and I realize that a common question in our team or from our customers is what are the best practices or the best approaches when defining the Hyper-V Network Architectures of your Private Cloud or your Virtualization farm. Hence I decided to write this series of posts that I think they might be helpful at least to do the brainstorm to find the best approach for every particular scenario. The reality is that each environment is different and use different hardware, but at least I can help you identify 5 common scenarios on how to squeeze the performance of your hardware.
I want to make clear that there is no just one right answer or configuration and your hardware can help you determine the best configuration for a robust, reliable and performer Hyper-V Network Architecture. Please note that I will do some personal recommendation based on my experience. These recommendations might or might not be the official – generic recommendations from Microsoft, so please call you support contact in case of any doubt.
The series will contain these post:
1. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 1 of 7 ) – Introduction (This Post)
5. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 5 of 7) – Converged Networks using Dynamic QoS
6. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 6 of 7 ) – Converged Network using CNAs
7. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 7 of 7 ) – Conclusions and Summary
8. Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures (Part 8 of 7) – Bonus
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Hyper-V
2012, Architecture, Cloud, cluster, configuration, hardware, Hyper-V, Microsoft, network, Network Architecture, Network Architectures, performance, powershell, QoS, R2, SCVMM
OpenStack and Nutanix – perfect match! (perfect with VMware and Microsoft as well of course) – #Nutanix, #OpenStack, #IaaS
May 2, 2014
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This is a good post by Dwayne Lessner around how perfect match OpenStack and Nutanix is (not just OpenStack of course, Nutanix rocks with VMware and Microsoft as well)!
Nutanix NDFS also provides an advanced and unique feature set for OpenStack based
private clouds. Key features include:
- Simplicity – The same great platform that simplified your virtualisation deployment can simplify the compute and storage deployment for key OpenStack services (Glance, Nova, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, and Swift)
- Single Scalable Fabric – NDFS provides a single fabric for data storage that integrates seamlessly with OpenStack services. NDFS-based storage is easy to provision, manage, and operate at scale.
- Hypervisor Agnostic – Just like OpenStack, Nutanix NDFS was designed from the ground up to be hypervisor agnostic. Nutanix enables customers to choose between KVM, Hyper-V, and the VMware ESXi hypervisor for deployments of OpenStack.
- Enterprise Ready – Nutanix enables a full set of enterprise storage features including Elastic Deduplication, Compression, In-Memory and Flash-based Caching, VM-Data Locality, intelligent Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), Snapshots, Fast Clones, and Live Migration.
Read more here.
Here you also have the link to the webinar with topic:
Building OpenStack on a Single 2U Appliance
OpenStack promises to be the open source cloud operating system. Automated provisioning and management of network, server and storage resource via a single dashboard is great, but how can you get the same one-stop-shop simplicity for the underlying infrastructure?Attend this advanced private cloud webinar and learn:
Categories: All, Cloud, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OpenStack, Storage
Cinder, Cloud, computing, deployment, design, ESXi, Glance, Horizon, Hyper-V, hypervisor, IaaS, Information Lifecycle Management, Keystone, KVM, Life-cycle, Microsoft, NDFS, Nova, Nutanix, Nutanix NDFS, OpenStack, perfect match OpenStack, Platform, private, private clouds, Swift, Virtual, VM, VMWare
Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365 – #Office365, #IAM
March 10, 2014
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This is cool!
Paul Andrew is a technical product manager on the Office 365 team working on identity.
Today we’re adding Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365 to Office 365 Midsize Business, Enterprise plans, Academic plans, Nonprofit plans, and standalone Office 365 plans, including Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. This will allow organizations with these subscriptions to enable multi-factor authentication for their Office 365 users without requiring any additional purchase or subscription.
Multi-factor authentication increases the security of user logins for cloud services above and beyond just a password. With Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365, users are required to acknowledge a phone call, text message, or an app notification on their smartphone after correctly entering their password. Only after this second authentication factor has been satisfied can a user sign in.
Multi-factor authentication has been available for Office 365 administrative roles since June 2013, and today we’re extending this capability to any Office 365 user. We’re also enhancing the capabilities that have been available since June. We’re adding App Passwords for users so they can authenticate from Office desktop applications as these are not yet updated to enable multi-factor authentication. And we’re enabling users who are authenticated from a federated on-premises directory to be enabled for multi-factor authentication.
This addition of multi-factor authentication is part of our ongoing effort to enhance security for Office 365, and we’re already working on Office desktop application improvements to Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365, which we’ll introduce later in this post. Office 365 offers many robust built-in security features for all customers and also optional controls that enable subscribers to customize their security preferences. More information about security in Office 365 is available inthe Office 365 Trust Center.
Let’s take a look at how Office 365 customers can take advantage of multi-factor authentication and configure it, including using App Passwords for Office desktop applications.
After entering your account password, you see a message like this while your phone is being called for acknowledgement.
Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365
Office 365 administrators enroll users for multi-factor authentication through the Office 365 admin center.
Categories: All, Microsoft, Office 365
Android, App, authentication, call, iOS, Microsoft, mobile, multi, Office 365, Office365, sms, two-factor
#App-V 5.0 Capacity Planning – #Microsoft via @micheroth and @vkleinerde
February 21, 2014
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This is a good article, have a look at this if you’re planning some App-V 5.0 capabilities!
The following recommendations can be used as a baseline to help determine capacity planning information that is appropriate to your organization’s App-V 5.0 infrastructure.
 Important |
|---|
| Use the information in this section only as a general guide for planning your App-V 5.0 deployment. Your system capacity requirements will depend on the specific details of your hardware and application environment. Additionally, the performance numbers displayed in this document are examples and your results may vary. |
Determine the Project Scope
Before you design the App-V 5.0 infrastructure, you must determine the project’s scope. The scope consists of determining which applications will be available virtually and to also identify the target users, and their locations. This information will help determine what type of App-V 5.0 infrastructure should be implemented. Decisions about the scope of the project must be based on the specific needs of your organization.
| Task | More Information |
|---|---|
| Determine Application Scope | Depending on the applications to be virtualized, the App-V 5.0 infrastructure can be set up in different ways. The first task is to define what applications you want to virtualize. |
| Determine Location Scope | Location scope refers to the physical locations (for example, enterprise-wide or a specific geographic location) where you plan to run the virtualized applications. It can also refer to the user population (for example, a single department) who will run the virtual applications. You should obtain a network map that includes the connection paths as well as available bandwidth to each location and the number of users using virtualized applications and the WAN link speed. |
Determine Which App-V 5.0 Infrastructure is Required
| Important |
|---|
| Both of the following models require the App-V 5.0 client to be installed on the computer where you plan to run virtual applications. You can also manage your App-V 5.0 environment using an Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) solution such as Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager. For more information see Deploying App-V 5.0 Packages by Using Electronic Software Distribution (ESD). |
- Standalone Model – The standalone model allows virtual applications to be Windows Installer-enabled for distribution without streaming. App-V 5.0 in Standalone Mode consists of the sequencer and the client; no additional components are required. Applications are prepared for virtualization using a process called sequencing. For more information see, Planning for the App-V 5.0 Sequencer and Client Deployment. The stand-alone model is recommended for the following scenarios:Full Infrastructure Model – The full infrastructure model provides for software distribution, management, and reporting capabilities; it also includes the streaming of applications across the network. The App-V 5.0..
- With disconnected remote users who cannot connect to the App-V 5.0 infrastructure.
- When you are running a software management system, such as Configuration Manager 2012.
- When network bandwidth limitations inhibit electronic software distribution.
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, App-V, Microsoft
2012, App-V, Architecture, capacity, deployment, Installer, Microsoft, planning, SCCM, System Center, windows
Almost perfect.. #ShareFile StorageZones on Azure is now generally available! – #Citrix, #Azure
February 11, 2014
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This is a great addition I must say, but some things are missing!
One thing that I’m missing is the full integration with Azure storage containers! You still have to specify a temp/cache storage location that today ShareFile controller requires to be on a CIFS share when you have multiple controllers. And if you put the controller up in Azure as well, how do you then get that CIFS share and make it highly available? There is no CIFS exposure directly from the Azure storage, you have to setup a couple of VM’s in Azure, do something like DFS to expose is.. and then all of a sudden you have a whole file service to manage there as well.. and to monitor and all of a sudden you need AD and monitoring and reporting of it.. phuuu…
So I hope that in next version we can specify an Azure storage container for that cache/temp storage as well! 😉
The other thing I’d really like to see is NetScaler support in Azure, so that we could do proper AAA/CS/LB of the controllers in Azure as well so that we can get a simple and fully cloud based service in Azure! 🙂
BYOD and a growing global workforce are generating demand for instant access to data, offline productivity and seamless collaboration from anywhere. Organizations are challenged with reconciling these forces with leveraging existing investments, protect intellectual property and meet regulatory compliance requirements – driving interest in ShareFile StorageZones. StorageZones offers IT the flexibility to store data in secure Citrix-managed datacenters in multiple worldwide locations, or on-premise within their own datacenters.
At Citrix Synergy 2013, we announced new ShareFile StorageZones options with Microsoft Windows Azure. We are now pleased to announce the general availability of ShareFile StorageZones on Azure with the release of ShareFile StorageZones Controller software version 2.2. This release includes support for Windows Azure storage containers, therefore if you have a Windows Azure account, you can use an Azure storage container for your private data storage instead of a locally maintained share. Hosting ShareFile data natively in your Microsoft Azure account helps IT build the most cost-effective and customized solution for their organization. This customer-managed solution integrates ShareFile with Microsoft Azure’s Binary Large Object (Blob) storage, a cloud service for storing large amounts of unstructured data that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS.
Product Overview
Azure storage is customer-managed storage hosted in the Windows Azure cloud. File uploads are initially deposited into a temporary storage area shared by all StorageZone controllers. Then, a background service copies those files to the Windows Azure storage container and deletes the local cached copy of the file(s).
Typically with CIFS based StorageZones, the Controller servers are installed on-premise in the customer’s datacenter. However, if a customer is hosting virtual machines in Azure, they could install the StorageZone Controller software on instances running in their Azure account and not necessarily on-premise.
Read the ShareFile StorageZones on Azure Storage Technical Brief and watch the video Installing and Configuring ShareFile StorageZones v2.2 with Microsoft Azure to learn more about this solution.
Check out our Citrix and…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Microsoft’s new CEO = Satya Nadella
February 4, 2014
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Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Microsoft
CEO of Microsoft, Microsoft, relentless drive, Satya Nadella
Google + Microsoft = Process Explorer 16.0 – #Google, #VirusTotal – via @lseltzer
February 3, 2014
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This is kind of cool!
The latest version of Process Explorer, one of the top tools in Microsoft’s popular Windows Sysinternals suite, has incorporated support for the popular VirusTotal service run by Google.
The Sysinternals tools were written by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell before Microsoft bought their company many years ago. Russinovich continues to develop the tools in his spare time at Microsoft while working on their Azure cloud service.
To quote the “What’s New” section on microsoft.com:
Thanks to collaboration with the team at VirusTotal, this Process Explorer update introduces integration with VirusTotal.com, an online antivirus analysis service. When enabled, Process Explorer sends the hashes of images and files shown in the process and DLL views to VirusTotal and if they have been previously scanned, reports how many antivirus engines identified them as possibly malicious. Hyperlinked results take you to VirusTotal.com report pages and you can even submit files for scanning.
VirusTotal was created and built up by Hispasec Systems, a Spanish security consulting firm. Over the years it became wildly popular to the point where it needed a cloud infrastructure on the scale that a company like Google could provide. Google took the service over in 2012 [Corrected from 2007]. Read more…
Categories: All, Microsoft, Security
DLL, explorer, Google, hashes, integration, malicious, Microsoft, process, virus, VirusTotal, virustotal.com, windows
Nutanix NX-3000 review: Virtualization cloud-style – #Nutanix, #IaaS
January 29, 2014
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A great review of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform! 🙂
What do you get when you combine four independent servers, lots of memory, standard SATA disks and SSD, 10Gb networking, and custom software in a single box? In this instance, the answer would be a Nutanix NX-3000. Pigeonholing the Nutanix product into a traditional category is another riddle altogether. While the company refers to each unit it sells as an “appliance,” it really is a clustered combination of four individual servers and direct-attached storage that brings shared storage right into the box, eliminating the need for a back-end SAN or NAS.
I was recently given the opportunity to go hands on with a Nutanix NX-3000, the four nodes of which were running version 3.5.1 of the Nutanix operating system. It’s important to point out that the Nutanix platform handles clustering and file replication independent of any hosted virtualization system. Thus, a Nutanix cluster will automatically handle node, disk, and network failures while providing I/O at the speed of local disk — and using local SSD to accelerate access to the most frequently used data. Nutanix systems support the VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, as well as KVM for Linux-based workloads.
[ The Nutanix NX-3000 is an InfoWorld 2014 Technology of the Year Award winner. Read about the other winning products in our slideshow, “InfoWorld’s 2014 Technology of the Year Award winners.” | For quick, smart takes on the news you’ll be talking about, check out InfoWorld TechBrief — subscribe today. ]
Nutanix was founded by experienced data center architects and engineers from the likes of Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. That background brings with it a keen sense of what makes a good distributed system and what software pieces are necessary to build a scalable, high-performance product. A heavy dose of innovation and ingenuity shows up in a sophisticated set of distributed cluster management services, which eliminate any single point of failure, and in features like disk block fingerprinting, which leverages a special Intel instruction set (for computing an SHA-1 hash) to perform data deduplication and to ensure data integrity and redundancy.
A Nutanix cluster starts at one appliance (technically three nodes, allowing for the failure of one node) and scales out to any number of nodes. The NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File System) provides a single store for all of your VMs, handling all disk and I/O load balancing and eliminating the need to use virtualization platform features like VMware’s Storage DRS. Otherwise, you manage your VMs no differently than you would on any other infrastructure, using VMware’s or Microsoft’s native management tools.
Nutanix architecture
The hardware behind the NX-3000 comes from SuperMicro. Apart from the fact that it squeezes four dual-processor server blades inside one 2U box, it isn’t anything special. All of the magic is in the software. Nutanix uses a combination of open source software, such as Apache Cassandra and ZooKeeper, plus a bevy of in-house developed tools. Nutanix built cluster configuration management services on ZooKeeper and heavily modified Cassandra for use as the primary object store for the cluster.
| Test Center Scorecard | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 20% | 20% | 20% | 20% | 10% | 10% | ||
| Nutanix NX-3000 Series | 10 | 9 | 10 | 9 | 9 | 8 |
9.3 EXCELLENT
|
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Cloud, Hyper-V, Infrastructure, Nutanix, OpenStack
availability, built, computing, facebook, Google, Hyper-V, independent servers, KVM, Microsoft, NS, Nutanix, performance, Platform, scalability, Test, Virtual, VMWare, Yahoo
#Citrix #ShareFile StorageZone controller 2.2 released – #BYOD
November 21, 2013
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If you haven’t seen this then have a look at what 2.2 now has to offer!
- StorageZones for ShareFile Data — You can store ShareFile data in either Windows Azure cloud storage or a private single-tenant storage system that you maintain. You specify a storage option when you configure StorageZones for ShareFile Data.
What’s new
StorageZones Controller 2.2 provides the following enhancements:
Support for Windows Azure storage containers — If you have a Windows Azure account, you can use an Azure storage container for your private data storage instead of a locally-maintained share.
To get started create a new zone and choose the Azure option when you configure StorageZones for ShareFile Data.
Connectors to SharePoint root-level sites — You can now create a StorageZones Connector for a SharePoint root-level site or site collection, enabling users to navigate all of the subsites and document libraries in the site. To provide more limited access, you can continue to create connectors to individual SharePoint document libraries.
Connectors to user home drives based on Active Directory — You can now create a Connector for network file shares that reliably points to user home drives. To create a connector for user home drives, set the UNC path to the variable %homedrive%. StorageZones Controller will then create connectors based on the user home folder path property in Active Directory.
Installation on non-English operating systems — You can install the English version of StorageZones Controller on the following operating system versions: French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish.
Read more here!
//Richard
Categories: All, Citrix, ShareFile
ad, byod, Citrix, Connector, controller, data storage, Dropbox, file share, Follow-me-data, Microsoft, network, ShareFile, SharePoint, storage, storage containers, StorageZone, transfer, UNC, windows, Windows Azure
10TB of free #cloud #storage from China’s #Tencent
November 20, 2013
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Wow, that really puts some pressure on the “other” guys!!! 10TB is a lot!
I’ve talked to people and some are concerned about that it’s a China owned company even though the storage will be located in the US and Southeast Asia though it’s the company that has the “power” to manage and control it, but let us set that aside for now! 10TB of free storage! 🙂
Chinese Internet giant Tencent is looking to dole out a jaw-dropping 10TB worth of free cloud storage to its international users soon, as it seeks to roll out an English version of its cloud storage product next year, PandoDaily reports.
Peter Zheng, the Shenzhen-based vice president of Tencent’s social network group, tells PandoDaily that the company will bring its cloud storage offering to the US in early 2014. It is also launching an English version of Story Camera, an Instagram-like watermark-based photo app already popular in China, in the next two to three weeks.
In August, Tencent started courting Chinese users with its very generous gift of space — as it sought to out-do its rivals Baidu and Qihoo, which started giving away 1TB worth of free storage.
As Tencent gets into the game with an English version of its cloud storage service though, it looks set to attract way more users around the world who want to get their hands on this colossal amount of space — which, to be honest, seems almost impossible to finish using.
The whopping 10TB puts the free space given by Dropbox, Box and Microsoft to shame. At their maximum amounts, Dropbox has offered free space amounts ranging from 25-50GB as part of promotional deals with Samsung and HTC, Box has offered 50GB of free storage with file-size limitations before, and Microsoft upped the storage space for its SkyDrive Pro offering from 7GB to 25GB.
However, just as with the Chinese rollout, Tencent will likely kick in the same caveat for its cloud storage offering — that is, you won’t get the whole 10TB worth of space at one go. Instead, Tencent will top up your storage space as you deplete it.
To put privacy concerns at ease, Zheng tells Pandodaily that the international data will probably be stored on servers outside of China — in the same way that Tencent’s messaging service WeChat uses servers in the US and Southeast Asia.
As Tencent is taking big strides…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 