Microsoft SQL Server is the backbone of many businesses, but when it comes to high availability, which path should you take: Always On Availability Groups (AG) or Failover Cluster Instances (FCI)?
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.
Contemporary Enterprise-grade environments have all-out unstoppable demands. Apart from exceptional redundancy and uptime, such infrastructures need impeccable backup. It must be in a hardened, non-domain joined setup that’s independent of the fabrics and workloads it protects, abide by the 3-2-1 rule, and have a small footprint.
If Azure’s built-in roles didn’t fit your needs perfectly but you still tried to adapt because you dreaded messing around in PowerShell to fix it, then this news is for you. Azure role-based access control (RBAC) can now be used directly from Azure Portal to assign your desired custom roles at subscription and resource group scopes.
As a flagship of industry, VMware knows better than anyone a simple recipe for staying on top. If you want to grow, you need to keep going. The latest release of VMware vSphere proves this well enough. So, let’s take a look under the hood what exactly this new VMware vSphere 7 has to offer!
Interconnecting multiple offices to the public cloud, e.g. Azure, can be somewhat problematic. You may need to maintain connectivity for your website, several applications, and other services Site to Site, all while having a dynamic public IP. Thanks to a number of Unifi apps, you can solve that issue and maintain stability.
Buying every separate feature or tool from VMware vSphere can prove too expensive for small deployments. Not having vCenter will mean you can’t run the host, which has vCenter Server Appliance, in maintenance mode. Nonetheless, you’ll still need to update your ESXi to the latest version for the environment to work properly.
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.
These days, you can never be too sure when it comes to cybersecurity. Updating your policies is key to avoid unnecessary exposure. Checking up your old passwords, on-premises and in the cloud, is crucial as well. To enforce that, Azure AD password protection uses both the global and custom banned-password lists.
You can’t have it all, and this is true even for the best things in life. It’s possible to schedule automatic shutdowns of VMs in Azure (one of the ways to cut Azure costs). But you can’t use the same Azure Portal to schedule their automatic boot-up the same way. A way out of it is to use PowerShell, however, there’s another trick you might like better.
Just earlier this April, Microsoft released an update for their Windows Virtual Desktop. Among others, the novelty includes a new graphical interface directly in the Azure port. Unfortunately, it seems like this is just a teaser though: the feature is currently available in Preview, only US regions are available through this portal. You can’t migrate there yet.