Hyper Converged Infrastructure. A bit of a buzzword, but does actually describe things. While traditional computers and the hardware beneath them are individual systems, providing services, HCI is the attempt to add an abstraction layer between computer, storage, and networking, between the systems that need it, and the hardware that provide it. This extends beyond basic virtualisation. The idea is that multiple servers can provide say, storage, and pool them together. The application, operating systems, or even hypervisors above don't know where or how the storage is configured, it is just one large pool. Here's a mildly helpful diagram ![[Pasted image 20250807124628.png]]