Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

At the beginning of the week, a customer asks me how he can migrate resource group from one subscription to another. He had a CSP contract and he needed to deploy “Bring-your-own-Licenses” products that were not available in CSP. So, he subscribed to an EA contract. Then he wanted to move resources from CSP to EA. However, he had a lot of dependent resources inside several resource groups. This topic shows you how to make this migration.

As an admin, I often have to deal with the necessity to transfer large OVF and ISO files or even move virtual machines (VMs) between ESXi hosts that have poor network performance or disposed in different locations with no network connection whatsoever. If a case like this occurs, a USB flash drive or USB external drive is a way to go. More specifically, you can use a drive in two different ways (by the way, both authors have my most sincere regards and appreciation for presenting these methods in a most coherent and simultaneously simple way). The first one is to copy files from a USB device to a host directly through SSH session without changing drive format as the following article suggests. However, such an approach has some issues, the most tedious one being maximum file size limitations, which certainly limits its use for larger files. You cannot work with the Graphical user interface (GUI) as well. Instead, you gotta use SSH and dive deep into the host data storage system, so you can figure I am a much bigger fan of a second way: creating a VMFS datastore on a USB drive. You can connect it to ESXi hosts and transfer files from one to another (or just store a temporary copy on an external storage device).

Even if you know all the backup ways and methods, you can always open a door to new knowledge. This time we’re talking about backing up Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), namely creating VM disk snapshots in order to back up a disk manually. But even in this process, you can get automation. How?

Seeing the full picture of how well your Azure is faring can be complicated. It can be quite problematic to consolidate its workloads visually into comprehensive documentation. Subsequently, the reports to customers on the cloud’s effectiveness can come out as too cumbersome. It can also be hard for your team and partners to assess its input into your business’ IT environment overall.

Hyperconvergence has dramatically transformed data center landscape over the past few years. New technologies are being developed, good old ones are being improved… We live in exciting times! And as data centers are becoming more reliable and powerful, it is important to get more out of the hardware in use: nobody likes to leave money on the table! Intel, Mellanox and StarWind have teamed up to develop a Hyper-V highly available cluster where you’ll get awesome performance without compromising ease of manageability of the environment. This article discusses the measurements in brief, showcasing the recent results.

Tracing your Azure’s health can be quite a challenge. Tons of daily entries delete, update, or create resources in the cloud, and some of these changes may result in a crash. For administrators, identifying which entry caused the error amidst the usual chaotic activity logs can be a problem, which may lead to severe downtime. Luckily, Log Analytics can help you solve such issues in no time.

In times when computing technology is moving by leaps and bounds, cloud migration happens quite often. While completely common, this process carries some dangers, such as web applications safety. It becomes an issue since you expose your sites publicly. However, if you move your servers to Azure, this won’t be a problem!

Nowadays it’s quite trendy to have penetration testing as a starting point for cybersecurity. Even though penetration testing is a good practice, it’s very limited and focused on one application/product and should therefore not be used as an entry point for cybersecurity.

Everybody knows that access errors are the most irritating ones in any computer-related activity. They become even more confusing if the traditional means to get behind it won’t work. Say, you are trying to connect your VM to a domain, and you get this infamous “access denied” message? Don’t worry that this will bother you.

VMware snapshots are important part of vSphere infrastructure. Using snapshots is very flexible way of being able to go back in time and revert changes. VMware snapshots are used by admins, developers and other IT team members who are not all VMware specialists. As such it might be a good idea to learn some good practices about snapshots and this technology, to get the most out of it.