Dell markets its EMC OpenManage extension for Windows Admin Center as a unified solution for ensuring Azure Stack HCI updates and compliance. Unfortunately, that is not the case since Dell’s extension is not in line with the current Azure hardware and software compliance matrix, and it’s not in tune with the latest WAC versions.

Azure Backup Center was revealed during Microsoft Ignite 2020. It will be later released as a single-pane-of-glass management and monitoring tool for Azure Backup vaults. The solution will allow you to monitor and configure your backups, restore data, and set a certain level of compliance, all from a single GUI. Read the short guide by Romain Serre, a Microsoft MVP, about Azure Backup Center, its benefits, and how you can preview it today.

Monitoring an HCI can be a real pain because of having to shuffle through multiple UIs, each responsible for a different stat. That’s why HCI vendors continuously aim to perfect their options for control. To simplify your Azure Stack HCI monitoring, you can enable Azure Monitor via Windows Admin Center, with its in-built rules, or create your own.

Among other new features, Azure Stack HCI brings the ability to create a stretched cluster. As a result, you’ll be able to unify geographically disparate host servers more effectively to ensure better performance. The only thing is that until Microsoft enables the feature’s deployment via an extension in WAC (coming soon), you’ll have to take a bit more steps to do that.

Azure Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure is Microsoft’s attempt to build a hybrid HCI solution that’s aimed to be an everything-in-one. Among others, the new release will have simplified deployment via Windows Admin Center and Azure Portal, a specialized host operating OS, improved resync duration for S2D, and a one-click stack upgrade.

Ubiquiti recently released its Unifi Dream Machine Pro (UDM-Pro), which is a multifaceted hardware platform. It executes various features, including firewall, switch, router, SDN, or camera management. Unifi Controller, a software, allows you to handle your Ubiquiti network and even establish a VPN with Azure for hybrid scenarios.

Every contemporary organization should have a disaster recovery plan (DRP) in place to ensure data safety and business continuity. With the accessibility of present-day cloud services, luckily, setting up a valid DRP isn’t that complex or expensive. Azure offers one such service that’ll keep your apps and workloads running even during outages.

Managing and sharing your VMs across different subscriptions in the cloud is necessary for having a flexible routine. Azure Shared Image Gallery is one such tool that enables that process. With it, you can manage VM images, deploy them across the world, perform versioning and grouping of images, and share them across subscriptions.

The previous text by this author explained how to deploy the Windows Virtual Desktop solution. Now that you’ve learned how Azure Active Directory can help simplify your shifting to remote work, there’s another trick. To further ease the process, you can deploy the session hosts by using an image.

Establishing VPN connections to your on-prem infrastructure and then managing resources from there can be too complicated and straining. To simplify that process, you can now use Azure Active Directory: deliver Kerberos and NTLM tokens for Azure Files, access company data from anywhere, add cache servers to ROBO, and more.