Load balancing services with AWS Route53 DNS health checks

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 4 Comments

DNS is a great technology that everyone uses over internet. How would you reach a given website if you weren’t able to solve its name to the IP address? Would you memorize the public IP addresses of any website you want to reach? No, and with IPv6 coming in the future, DNS will become even more important for internet consumption. But DNS has one drawback: its records are usually static, and if a platform is dynamic and spawn/removes instances on the fly, it needs to have a way to modify the DNS records that are published, so that a non-reachable instances is not even listed.

Increase the performance of your Veeam backups in network mode

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 1 Comment

If you ever tried to do any file operation via the management interface of an ESXi host, like uploading an ISO file or running a backup using Network Mode, you may know the management interface is not running at the full speed of the underlying network interface, and the bandwidth you end up using is only a percentage of the total available. This limit is designed to preserve the availability of the management interface, but still there are situations where this limit is a problem, and you would like to increase it. Hopefully, there’s a solution.

Build a Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cluster using VMware virtual machines

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 10 Comments

I’ve always been a fan of scale-out storage architecture, I’ve always said that The future of storage is Scale Out, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying software-only solutions like Ceph. The new solution from Microsoft, Storage Spaces Direct, seems like another great solution that will be soon available to us, so I decided to test it in my lab.