Category: Reviews

Performance 0

Reviews

[Review]: Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2016

When you run a server system in your organization, you might have business needs not met using default server settings. For example, you might need the lowest possible energy consumption, or the lowest possible latency, or the maximum possible throughput on your server. This guide provides a set of guidelines that you can use to tune the server settings in Windows Server 2016 and obtain incremental performance or energy efficiency gains, especially when the nature of the workload varies little over time.

Performance 1

Reviews

[Review]: Microsoft Server Performance Advisor

The original version of Microsoft Server Performance Advisor (SPA) was released in 2005-2006. It primarily targeted Windows Server 2003, including the core operating system and server roles such as Internet Information Services (IIS) and Active Directory. The goal of the tool is to help you assess your server performance and troubleshoot server performance issues.

Microsoft Windows Insight 0

News / Operating System / Reviews

[Review]: Introducing Windows Server System Insights

As an IT admin, one of the responsibilities you have is to ensure systems continue to run smoothly. That is true for a number of activities and components, such as monitoring if a disk is going to run out of space, determining how much memory and processing a Hyper-V host is consuming so you can plan for new VMs, and many other examples.

Linux Kernel Patching 0

Operating System / Reviews

[Review]: What’s kernel Live Patching?

Dynamic Software Updating (DSU) Dynamic Software Updating (DSU) is a field of research pertaining to upgrading programs while they are running. DSU is not currently widely used in industry. However, researchers have developed a wide variety of systems and techniques for implementing DSU. These systems are commonly tested on real-world programs. Current operating systems and programming languages are typically not designed with DSU in mind. As such, DSU implementations commonly either utilize existing tools, or implement specialty compilers. These compilers preserve the semantics of the original program, but instrument either the source code or object code to produce a dynamically update-able program. Researchers compare DSU-capable variants of programs to the original program to assess safety and performance overhead. Software Hot-Swapping Hot swapping can also refer to the ability to alter the running code of a program without needing to interrupt its execution. Interactive programming is a programming paradigm that makes extensive use of hot swapping, so the programming activity becomes part of the program flow itself. Only a few programming languages support hot swapping natively, including Pike, Lisp, Erlang, Smalltalk, Visual Basic 6 (Not VB.net), Java and most recently Elm and Elixir. Microsoft Visual Studio supports a kind of hot swapping called Edit and Continue, which is supported by C#, VB.NET and C/C++ when running under a debugger. Hot swapping is the central method in live coding,...

Remote Direct Memory Access 1

Reviews / Server Virtualization

[Review]: What’s Remote Direct Memory Access(RDMA)?

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) provides direct memory access from the memory of one host (storage or compute) to the memory of another host without involving the remote Operating System and CPU, boosting network and host performance with lower latency, lower CPU load and higher bandwidth. In contrast, TCP/IP communications typically require copy operations, which add latency and consume significant CPU and memory resources.

Oracle Secure Global Desktop 1

Desktop Virtualization / Reviews

[Review]: Oracle Secure Global Desktop

Oracle Secure Global Desktop is a secure remote access solution for any cloud-hosted enterprise application and hosted desktops running on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Oracle Solaris and mainframe servers. Oracle Secure Global Desktop works with a wide range of popular client devices, including Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs, Chromebook and tablets such as the Apple iPad and Android-based devices.

Windows Admin Center - Server Manager 1

Operating System / Reviews

[Review]: Windows Admin Center (Project Honolulu)

Windows Admin Center (Formerly Project Honolulu) is a new browser based management tool. Windows Admin Center the evolution of traditional in-box server management tools for situations where you might have used Remote Desktop (RDP) to connect to a server for troubleshooting or configuration. It’s not intended to replace other existing Microsoft management solutions.

VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) 1

Reviews / Server Virtualization

[Review]: VMware vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO)

This is not a new features on last vSphere version but I went to write a post about that. We had to deploy different replication scenarios for our customers and some customers needs Point-In-Time Recovery (PiT) and The PiT solutions using VAIO actually so learning about the API is necessary for administrators.

The vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) were introduced in vSphere 6.0 Update 1. The VAIO framework and program were developed to provide VMware and partners the ability to insert filters for I/O into the data path of virtual machines. These “I/O Filters” enable VMware, and partners, to intercept and manipulate the I/O. This manipulation can provide open-ended data services, but thus far is limited to four use cases, two of which are currently exclusive to VMware and two which are open for partners. These use cases are: Replication, Caching, Quality of service (VMware only), Encryption (VMware only).

[Review]: Undocumented VMware VMX Configuration Parameters 1

Reviews

[Review]: Undocumented VMware VMX Configuration Parameters

VMware VMX Configuration Parameters Using undocumented configuration parameters at your own risk, so don’t use configurations that you don’t know its impact. AIOMGR aiomgr.noContinueOnFailure aiomgr.numThreads aiomgr.simple aiomgr.unbuf ANSWER answer.msg.serial.disconnect BIOS bios.bootDelay bios.bootDeviceClasses bios.bootOrder bios.bootRetry.delay bios.bootRetry.enabled bios.forceSetupOnce bios.hddOrder CBTMOTION (Change Block Tracking) cbtmotion.compareDisks cbtmotion.filter.ctk.disable cbtmotion.filter.disable cbtmotion.filter.linearHeat.enable cbtmotion.filter.linearHeat.threshold cbtmotion.forceEagerZeroedThick cbtmotion.forceZeroedThick cbtmotion.leaveDestinationDisks cbtmotion.leaveSourceDisks cbtmotion.maxIters cbtmotion.showPerfCtrs CDROM cdrom.aiomgr cdrom.asyncTimeout cdrom.guestPollAllowance cdrom.iso.aiomgr cdrom.logging cdrom.logMaxCmd cdrom.logMaxRes cdrom.minVirtualTime cdrom.modeSenseInterval cdrom.passthroughTimeout cdrom.reconnectDelayMS cdrom.releaseTimeout cdrom.reopenOnMediaChange cdrom.sessionCloseTimeout cdrom.showIsoLockWarning cdrom.synchronous cdrom.useNonUnified cdrom.useSGIO CHECKPOING (Snapshot Related) checkpoint.compressLevel checkpoint.cptConfigName checkpoint.disableCpuCheck checkpoint.displayProgress checkpoint.forceFSRFailure checkpoint.format.64bit checkpoint.logSizes checkpoint.mks.displayTopology.displayId checkpoint.mks.displayTopology.isPrimary checkpoint.mks.displayTopology.positionX checkpoint.mks.numScreenshots checkpoint.mks.saveimage checkpoint.mks.screenshot checkpoint.overrideVersionCheck checkpoint.runSuspendTest checkpoint.stuntiming checkpoint.stunTortureTest checkpoint.stunTortureTestIterations checkpoint.stunTortureTestPeriod checkpoint.stunTortureTestStartDelay checkpoint.suspendTestIterations checkpoint.timing checkpoint.vmState checkpoint.vmState.readOnly CHIPSET chipset.enableGART chipset.onlineStandby chipset.type chipset.useAcpiBattery chipset.useApmBattery chipset.useHotButtons chipset.version CPUID cpuid.coresPerSocket cpuid.disable_apicExtRegs cpuid.disable_mca cpuid.disable_vme cpuid.enable_svm cpuid.enable_vmx cpuid.supportsMulticore DEBUG debug.vmss debug.watchfault.addr debug.watchfault.fastfaults debug.watchfault.num debug.watchfault.rip DEPLOYPKG deployPkg.begin deployPkg.deploy deployPkg.update.state DISK disk.AllowDupUUID disk.canShrinkRedo disk.EnableUUID disk.EnableUUIDHW7 disk.fixAdapter disk.fragment.minNumIOs disk.fragment.minPercentage disk.hotRemoveOnFail disk.maxNumLinks disk.mustDela disk.period disk.powerOnWithDisabledDisk disk.PTReadOverride disk.shrinkredo disk.uuidPossible DISKLIB disklib.dataCacheMaxRAIOSize disklib.sparse.bigJobGTWritePolicy disklib.sparse.bigJobMaxChangesBeforeFlush disklib.sparse.bigJobMaxDirtyGTEs disklib.sparse.bigJobRGTWritePolicy disklib.sparse.gtWritePolicy disklib.sparse.maxChangesBeforeFlush disklib.sparse.rgtWritePolicy DMOTION (Storage vMotion) dMotion.enabled EEPROM eeprom.data eeprom.runtime.addrBits eeprom.runtime.addrReg eeprom.runtime.busy eeprom.runtime.dataBits eeprom.runtime.dataReg eeprom.runtime.DO eeprom.runtime.eepromLocked eeprom.runtime.lastCS eeprom.runtime.lastDI eeprom.runtime.lastSK eeprom.runtime.reportBusyStatus eeprom.runtime.stateMachine eeprom.runtime.writeEnabled ETHERNET ethernet%d.address ethernet%d.addressType ethernet%d.allowGuestConnectionControl ethernet%d.bsdName ethernet%d.connectionType ethernet%d.delayedInterruptThreshold ethernet%d.devName ethernet%d.disableMorphToVmxnet ethernet%d.displayName ethernet%d.downWhenAddrMismatch ethernet%d.dvs.connectionId ethernet%d.dvs.portgroupId ethernet%d.dvs.portId ethernet%d.dvs.switchId ethernet%d.exclusive ethernet%d.filter%d.name ethernet%d.filter%d.onFailure ethernet%d.filter%d.param%d ethernet%d.forcedToBridged ethernet%d.generatedAddress ethernet%d.generatedAddressOffset ethernet%d.ignoreMACAddressConflict ethernet%d.interruptDelay ethernet%d.intrMode ethernet%d.linkStatePropagation.enable ethernet%d.networkName ethernet%d.noForgedSrcAddr ethernet%d.noPromisc ethernet%d.noReceiveAfterSend ethernet%d.noUPT ethernet%d.numRecvBuffers...

Container Linux - Clustering 2

Reviews

[Review]: What is Container Linux?

Container Linux Container Linux by Core OS (Core OS Linux) is a lightweight operating system which developed for servers and cluster under Apache License 2.0 . Initial release was October 3, 2013, 4 years ago and latest stable release is 1576.5.0 January 5, 2018. Container Linux has been developed to providing clustered infrastructure for running software on Linux containers. Container Linux has minimum software and tools, the operating system is very light and designed for hosting containers. It also provides automation solutions for application deployment, security, reliability and scalability. Overview Container Linux offers no package manager for installing and upgrading software packages, instead of installing applications, Container Linux offers Operating-system-level virtualization for deploying application on Linux containers. That way, resource partitioning between containers is performed through multiple isolated userspace instances, instead of using a hypervisor and providing full-fledged virtual machines. This approach relies on the Linux kernel’s cgroups and namespaces functionalities which together provide abilities to limit, account and isolate resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc.) for the collections of userspace processes. Container Linux using dual boot partition mechanism for applying new security and reliability patches after reboot or kexec. Dual boot partition mechanism provides better system reliability because there is rollback point to previous state. Container Linux provides etcd, a daemon that runs across all computers in a cluster and provides a...

vSAN ReadyNode Configurator - vSAN OEM 0

Reviews / Server Virtualization

[Review]: What’s vSAN ReadyNode?

vSAN ReadyNode are x86 servers, available from all the leading server vendors, that have been pre-configured, tested and certified for VMware Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Software. Each ReadyNodes is optimally configured for vSAN with the required amount of CPU, memory, network, I/O controllers and storage (SSDs, HDDs or flash devices).