One of the things I come across time and again is a lack of monitoring in what are supposed to be corporate environments. I am honestly surprised at how little monitoring is carried out on infrastructure. These days, it is quite possible to carry out some very in-depth monitoring by using a freely available software on Linux and Windows. In this article, I’m going to go through the various monitoring tools that I use to monitor both production and my lab environment.

Having extensive monitoring in a lab is handy when testing systems as not only are it possible to get an idea of the sorts of information you can get from the device when it’s in production but you also get to see how it works thanks to having a greater visibility of the system. These little insights are always handy for putting into documentation ahead of deploying to production plus it’s a huge help when you’ve already seen error messages before and have a clearer understanding of what may have caused them.

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In this first blog post, I’ll walk you through to migrate Active Directory objects (users, groups, and workstations or member servers) between two domains in the same forest (Intraforest) using Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) 3.2.

ADMT allows you to migrate objects (including users, groups, computers, profiles, service and managed service accounts) with the help of ADMT console, command line, and VBScript. However, in this post, I’ll focus only on ADMT console and command line.

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Introduction

Tapes have been on the “backup market” for a long time and still are considered as a good option to store and secure a high amount of backup data. However, the continuous increase of backup size becomes a bottleneck in terms of fitting backup windows and reduces a simplicity and redundancy of backup solutions. Today more and more companies consider backing up their production data to more reasonable storage solutions, like Clouds.

Here comes in hand the technology that emulates physical tapes on top of inexpensive, fast, and high-capacity spindle drives.

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In previous installments of this blog, we have deconstructed the idea of cognitive data management (CDM) to identify its “moving parts” and to define what each part contributes to a holistic process for managing files and more structured content.

First and foremost, CDM requires a Policy Management Framework that identifies classes of data and specifies their hosting, protection, preservation and privacy requirements of each data class over its useful life.  This component reflects the nature of data, whose access requirements and protection priorities tend to change over time.

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Microsoft is transforming the Azure Backup platform into a reliable solution for managing the virtual machines protection after all Azure Backup is one of the “low-hanging fruits” available for IT admins that want to start trying cloud solutions. Now they are previewing the Azure Backup pre-checks to guarantee a clean and straightforward process when you are protecting your workloads.

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Introduction

This article describes the new StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance, which was released on 26^th of April. StarWind has always been a Windows native solution. However, due to market trends and the huge interest of our customers, we have decided to work in Linux direction. The main goal of the article is to show what StarWind VSA can do for clients and how you can work with it.

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Microsoft is always looking to offer newer and faster ways for their customers to embrace cloud services, even if you are not moving any of your workloads to Azure, MS wants for your company to integrate with the cloud. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms are a simple way to start, even for Internet-of-Things (IoT), that’s why the Redmond company is announcing: IoT Central.

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I did previously setup during a few occasions, VPN access on Windows Server 2012 R2, but haven’t tested that on the newly released Windows Server 2016.

Remote access role is a VPN which protects the network connection or your remote connection from one side to another and protecting both sides from attacks or data sniffing as VPN protocol uses a tunnel inside of a standard data connection.

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Introduction

The reason for writing this article was the goal of eliminating any possible confusion in the process of configuring the StarWind Virtual Tape Library in pair with the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager.

The integration of SCDPM provides a benefit of consolidating the view of alerts across all your DPM 2016 servers. Alerts are grouped by disk or tape, data source, protection group and replica volumes, which simplifies troubleshooting. The grouping functionality is further completed with the console capable of separating issues that only affect one data source from problems that impact multiple data sources. Alerts are also separated into backup failure or infrastructure problems.

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On 28th of September, Microsoft has released the Virtual Network peering, in GA.

This new functionality gives you the opportunity to connect 2 Virtual Network in Azure between them, by using the network of the Azure Datacenter. Bye bye VPN S2S between virtual network 🙂

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