Some months ago, Microsoft acquires the Cloudyn company. This company developed an interface to manage your cost and to have billing information, for one or multiple subscription, on one console. They support some other cloud service provider like AWS and Google Cloud, it’s why it’s very interesting.
For Azure, it’s free of charge to use this software. You can connect your EA, CSP or other subscription.
For AWS, it’s free until June, after it will cost 1% of your revenue (on AWS or Google Cloud).
Learn More
Loading...
In this article, I will describe how to manage Windows Containers via GUI. Docker provides a great Docker CLI that allows us to create, interact and delete containers but sometimes, it’s nice to have an interface to manage Containers. There are many admins who much prefer a GUI tool to handle every task and it can be useful to use an interface when you have many containers to manage or if you start working with Docker. In this article, I don’t want to judge which GUI is better because it depends! You must use the GUI that will suit your needs. So do not hesitate to test these GUI. In this article, I will walk through the following tools:
- Kitematic
- Portainer
- Dockstation
For sure, there are others interfaces so this list is not exhaustive.
Learn More
Loading...
Looking back at the previous articles in our “How-to-Core basics”, we have managed to install the Core version of Windows Server 2016. As well, the required networks were set, and the storage for the virtual machines was created.
In the final part of the trilogy, I’ll cover the steps left to prepare the environment in order to make your production highly available and fault-tolerant.
Being short, last time, we were up to installing Windows Server Core version on a single server and adding the storage as an iSCSI target. Highly available and fault-tolerant storage requires another server to create the failover cluster. There’s not much difference between the required configuration and the steps we did previously.
Learn More
Loading...
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. With this we are seeing a lot of applications providing users the ability to generate self-signed certificates to get the job done. While this is ok, you may be thrown off and annoyed by the constant nagging from modern browsers such and Chrome, Firefox, and Edge – having to accept the self-signed cert bypassing some scary messages. 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.
Learn More
Loading...
In part of my job, I audit some Hyper-V clusters to remediate issues such as Live Migration. Most of the time, Live Migration part is not well configured. For example, the wrong network is selected or authentication is left to CredSSP. In this topic, I’ll show you how I configure Live Migration in Hyper-V clusters (S2D or not).
Learn More
Loading...
I guess once you will read through this article you will also notice how this technology is shaped out of familiar building blocks, but what I also hope for is that you will get a grasp of what is AlwaysOn, and get a basic understanding of how it works. I will fully cover installation and configuration of SQL Server AlwaysOn environment (using new and shiny SQL Server 2017) in my next article while focusing on technology overview here.
Learn More
Loading...
One day, any VMware administrator may require the so-called “support bundle” which contains log-files, diagnostic information, and performance metrics. Taken together, these parameters allow troubleshooting VMware vSphere. The bundle provides VMware GSS (Global Support Services) the insight into virtualized environment configuration which allows them to resolve issues, when a client submits a support ticket with this bundle attached.
Apart from that, the bundle comes in handy, for example, while analyzing the reasons of the “pink screen of death” (PSOD) in ESXi environment and other errors.
This article discusses retrieving the support bundle for VMware vCenter servers (be it Windows or vCenter Server Appliance, vCSA) and VMware ESXi.
Before we go deeper, here’s a small note: the support bundle can bloat to 300 MB, depending on what it contains, the frequency of infrastructure configuration changes, and how long ago the last change has been made.
Learn More
Loading...
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.
Learn More
Loading...
You may have heard that RAID is no longer applicable for enterprise storage: that it’s time had passed. RAID has dominated enterprise storage for decades and, while not a hot topic of conversation today, it remains a key strategic approach for businesses to consider.
To some degree, it is true, RAID is no longer the singular answer to enterprise storage that it once was. For decades it was unchallenged as a technology and as an approach, and so reigned alone – a foregone conclusion in a giant sea of storage. Today, RAIN has joined the space and is a viable alternative to RAID in many scenarios. But just because RAIN is newer and the darling of storage conversations does not mean that RAIN will simply displace RAID nor that RAID’s position of importance has been eliminated. Not at all.
Learn More
Loading...
In my time in IT I’ve installed certificates quite a few times on various web servers and into various applications but it’s really only in the past two years that I’ve started looking into HTTPS and the myriad of options that come with certificates which are often hidden deep into config files but yet can make the difference between a site that can be rendered vulnerable via a HTTPS downgrade attack or one that is actually secure because today, installing a cert is simply the tip of the iceberg so I thought it might be handy to go through the options that need to be set in a web servers config file in order to get A+ on both the Qualys and securityheaders.io web servers.
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.
Learn More
Loading...
