Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

As the title is speaking for itself, it is quite clear that today, I am going to discuss various methods to open and close firewall ports on ESXi hosts. It is useless to consider whether configuring firewall rules is harmful or not since every admin once in a while meets the necessity of fine-tuning network to distribute access rights. So, you ought to know all the tools at your disposal one way or another.

Not every company owns a sophisticated infrastructure packed with shared storage, virtual SANs, NVMe, etc. Migrating systems, especially VMs, in an average IT environment could create workload disruptions because you’d have to stall other processes. Finally, however, those days are over: vMotion can migrate your VMs while keeping all systems active and operational.

Creating of Windows domain has always been a rock on which admins split. There are ones who will vouch for GUI. The others are more prone to PowerShell use. What do I think? Well, PowerShell is a flexible and universal tool, unlike GUI. So, no wonder this article is dedicated to creating and configuring a domain on Windows Server 2016 via PowerShell exclusively. I want to establish whether it will be helpful in the automation of this whole process.

Microsoft Teams is set to supersede Skype for StaffHub and Business. It’s a powerful tool in itself, so knowing how to make the most of it is crucial for managing your workload organically. Luckily, PowerShell Universal Dashboard can help you monitor your Microsoft Teams Cloud call queues as if they were on the palm of your hand.

Azure Monitor is a feature in Windows Admin Center that is still in preview, but you can make good use of it already. So why wait? Unfortunately, some people have issues with configuring alerts in Azure Monitor and rightfully so: it has to be done through Azure Portal. But don’t fret — it’s going to take you just a few minutes to get into it and set up whatever rules you need.

We often tend to believe that operating systems are secured by default, but securing your Linux servers to protect your data, intellectual property and time is the responsibility of the system administrator.

In this post we will review some of the basics operations that shall always be done while installing a new Linux server. We will use Debian as an example for the different commands but finding the rights commands for RedHat, CentOs or any other Linux distribution should be quite straight forward once you know what you are looking for and what you’d like to achieve.

Last year, my colleague asked me for advice. He couldn’t add an iSCSI target, provided by AWS Storage Gateway, on VMware ESXi cluster. So, initially, this material was intended to serve as a manual. However, since I got a similar question once more just recently, I realized that this topic could be interesting to the others as well, which is why I decided to share this guide, hoping it will be useful.

Virtualization was always about making the most out of less. But corporations fighting over customers divided them into incompatible camps. Recently, though, the winds in the industry have changed. VMware just launched an application mobility platform that migrates and re-balances on-premises vSphere and non-vSphere (Hyper-V and KVM) infrastructures to public clouds based on VMware vCloud!

IT infrastructure security is a number one priority, whether it be bare-metal or virtual infrastructure. The matter of safety in a Hyper-V environment, in particular, is one of those things that require attention first and foremost. However, whereas the fundamental aspects of covering the question of protection are widely known, there are always tiny details nobody really pays any attention to. Even experienced IT administrators tend to pass them by. This article takes focus on such issues. Either in a highly virtualized environment or private cloud, every one of them can become crucial.
Admittedly, establishing security baselines in the Hyper-V environment is a sink-or-swim scenario. The primary user concern is the host operating system (OS) and network hardware: you simply cannot maintain security on a proper level with only one product active. The safety of the Hyper-V environment requires a complex set of measures, including but not limited to constant monitoring of services and equipment.
All your virtual machines (VMs) and resources are dependent on the hypervisor. If someone takes control of it, you can say goodbye to all your data. That is why Hyper-V security is essential. Check out potentially dangerous mistakes listed in this article while setting up and maintaining network hardware, host OS, and your Hyper-V environment so that it won’t be infected with ransomware.

Perfection knows no limits and so does Windows Server. Microsoft is on a crusade of ever-perfecting it, and the new version has something to say, indeed. It seems like the company might be coming after virtualization vendors. Why? Well, some of the new features include storage migration, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, and ReFS deduplication… Just saying…