The RDMA wars in regards to SMB Direct: RoCE versus iWarp.

Most every application we run in our datacenters today provides some sort of web-based interface.  The push to move to HTML5, API driven GUIs is a good one – we can access things from anywhere, using any device or browser.  The problem being we are also seeing a push for security, more specifically ensuring that all our web accessible interfaces are running through SSL and only accessed through https. To get around this administrators can go out and purchase a certificate from a trusted authority, however this could get pretty expensive if you start adding up all of the self-signed certificates within your environment.  Another answer – the Microsoft Certificate Server.

In this article, I will not explain what is and what is not DevOps. I just want to describe how to implement a DevOps Project in your Azure subscription through the new service called “DevOps Projects”. This new service has been released in November 2017. The “DevOps Projects” service allows you to deploy and monitor your application in Azure. Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Services are Microsoft’s DevOps solutions for Azure. I’m not a VS or TFS expert, but as you will see, implementing DevOps with Azure is very straightforward. Microsoft says that you can implement your project in less than 5 minutes! Let’s see if it’s true.

This blog is going to be all about the secure certificate side of things, by setting these headers you reduce the chances of certain types of probes and attacks from being successful. The server itself and whatever applications you are running on it still need to be upgraded and configured to reduce the chances of someone gaining unauthorised access to your systems.

The term User Interface (UI) is used for specifying how a user interacts with a specific device, or software. CLI and GUI are two different types of possible user interfaces. Let’s analyze those different approaches and the pro and cons of them, using the VMware vSphere environment as an example.

SMI-S or ‘Storage Management Initiative – Specification’ is a standard of a storage management (surprise!) which gives you a chance to administrate the storage layer using ‘Common Information Model’ and Web-Based Enterprise Management technologies and logic. The main point of SMI-S is to provide a single standard to manage various storage systems from different vendors pretty much in the same way. In this article (?) we will show you how to manage your storage using SCVMM 2016 (Server Center Virtual Machine Manager) through SMI-S, and how this whole thing works in general. We’ll use VSAN from StarWind as a reference distributed storage platform, but the primary scope of this document is to cover the subject in general, so any SMI-S compatible storage will work.

Before we dive into how to enable Active Directory Recycle Bin in Windows Server 2016, we will first explain what it is and when Microsoft introduced this feature. Active Directory Recycle Bin simply allows you to restore deleted objects from Active Directory. It can be a user account, computer account or a whole Organizational Unit (OU). Who did not accidentally delete an AD object in his career?
Without this feature enabled, you had only a few choices. Either you could restore if you used a backup solution allowing you to restore individual AD objects (many virtualization backup vendors do that nowadays). Or you have had less chance and your AD server wasn’t configured to be backed up and you have to recreate the user and reinstall his profile on his computer.

Official Microsoft description:
“Azure DevTest Lab is a service that helps developers and testers to quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. You can test latest version of your application by quickly provisioning Windows and Linux environments using reusable templates and artifacts.”

In other words, Azure DevTest Labs is a great service that will help you to implement DevOps in your organization. Azure DevTest Labs will allows you to easily deploy Virtual Machines in order to test your workload in Azure. Setting up a development and test environment can take lots of time for your Ops Team.

You all probably know that our main goal is delivering all the “building blocks” required to construct a full-stack IT infrastructure. This is ensured by a portfolio that has solutions for most business problems for IT systems. With the ever-increasing popularity of cloud computing, StarWind has recently created an easy-entry-to-cloud solution suitable for any businesses. It ensures that your data is always safe and readily available, regardless of outside factors. Before we take a deep dive into StarWind Hybrid Cloud, let’s overview common cloud deployment models.

After seeing on how to start with Intune in the new Azure Portal, we will see how to enroll devices (iOS, Android & Windows 10) and how to deploy applications on them.