Month: February 2017

Dataon S2D-3212 HyperConverged Cluster

jantorep

Updated 27. feb

We have been testing Storage Spaces Direct for a while on our Ebay cluster. We have been running development and some production systems. As the 2nd exchange node, a mediation server and our vmm server.

We have been looking to replace our current Hyper-V solution that consist of HP BL465c G8 and  BL490 G7 blade servers attached to HP P2000 G3 MSA over iscsi. This has been slower and slower as we have setup more virtual machines. This was a 12 disk shelf with 11 disks active with one spare. One 15k disk gives about 170 iops, giving a whopping 1870 iops on max speed. On normal load it would use about 1200-1500  IOPS so not a lot of spare IOPS. We had one pr cluster.

Most of you know what S2D(Storage Spaces Direct) is, if you don’t go look at Cosmos Darwin’s post over at Technet to get some good insight about S2D.

What i am going to focus on in this blog is the new Dataon HyperConverged server. Back at Ignite 2016  Dataon released there first offering the S2D-3110 all flash solution pumping out 2.6 Million IOPS in a 1u form factor. Read more →

Setup VPN to use MFA with NPS Extension

jantorep

In this blog post i will show you how to setup a Microsoft VPN connection with the new NPS Extension for Azure AD MFA.

This is new service that the Microsoft NPS team just released, that adds an Extension to the Windows Network Policy Server.

When using the NPS extension for Azure MFA, the authentication flow includes the following components:

This is copied from https://docs.microsoft.com/nb-no/azure/multi-factor-authentication/multi-factor-authentication-nps-extension

  1. NAS/VPN Server receives requests from VPN clients and converts them into RADIUS requests to NPS servers.
  2. NPS Server connects to Active Directory to perform the primary authentication for the RADIUS requests and, upon success, passes the request to any installed extensions.
  3. NPS Extension triggers a request to Azure MFA for the secondary authentication. Once the extension receives the response, and if the MFA challenge succeeds, it completes the authentication request by providing the NPS server with security tokens that include an MFA claim, issued by Azure STS.
  4. Azure MFA communicates with Azure Active Directory to retrieve the user’s details and performs the secondary authentication using a verification method configured to the user.

The following diagram illustrates this high-level authentication request flow:

Authentication flow diagram

Read more →