Davoud Teimouri - Virtualization and Data Center Blog

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.

security advisory 0

News

[News]: VMware Tools HGFS Vulnerability

VMware Tools HGFS Out-Of-Bounds Read Vulnerability VMware Tools contains an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in HGFS. Successful exploitation of this issue may lead to information disclosure or may allow attackers to escalate their privileges on guest VMs. Note: In order to be able to exploit this issue, file sharing must be enabled. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the identifier CVE-2018-6969 to this issue. VMware Tools must be updated to 10.3.0 for each Windows VM to resolve CVE-2018-6969. The new version is available at the below link: VMware Tools 10.3.0 It’s recommended that upgrade VMware Tools if you have enabled sharing but I think, it’s better upgrade VMware Tools anyway. Other resolved issues in this release are as follows: Repair option is removed from the Control Panel of VMware Tools installer.Repair option is replaced with Change option in the Control Panel of VMware Tools installer.This issue is resolved in this release. Process ID of a discontinued VMware Tools service might get reused immediately by the system.On Linux and UNIX like operating systems, the process id (PID) of a stopped VMware Tools service might get reused immediately by the system. As a result, the new process might get aborted by the VMware Tools service init script.If this occurs...

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.

Free Tools 1

Free Tools

[Free Tools]: VMware Logon Monitor

VMware Logon Monitor monitors Windows user logons and reports a wide variety of performance metrics intended to help administrators, support staff, and developers troubleshoot slow logon performance. Metrics include, but are not limited to, logon time, CPU/memory usage, and network connection speed. VMware Logon Monitor also receives metrics from other VMware products which provide even more clues about what is happening during the logon flow.

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.

Illustration of RecoverPoint for VMs protecting VMware VMs 0

Backup & Replication / Server Virtualization

[Review]: Dell EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines

RecoverPoint for VMs is a virtualized solution that provides data replication, protection, and recovery within the VMware vSphere environment.

Enable quick recovery of VMware virtual machines to any point in time. Dell EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines provides continuous data protection (CDP) for operational recovery and disaster recovery. You’ll manage your VM protection simply and efficiently.

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).