Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Recently at my job, I was faced with a task to develop a file server explicitly suited for the requirements of the company. Needless to say, any configuration of a kind depends on what the infrastructure needs. So, drawing from my personal experience and numerous materials on the web, I came up with the combination FreeBSD+SAMBA+AD as the most appropriate. This combination is a harmonic addition to the existing network configuration since and enables admins with a broad range of possibilities for access control in Windows-based infrastructures. Also, Samba allows you to apply its network resources for Windows client OSs without any additional configurations required. Moreover, FreeBSD is well-documented.

Keeping your credentials and online behavior safe is key to upholding corporate cybersecurity. But the number of applications that are used on-premises and in the Web grow every day. Such conditions require employees to have various access identities with different credentials. Consequently, it causes unnecessary work complexity and potential online threats. Read the article by Romain Serre about using Azure AD Connect to synchronize identities across your on-premises and web application directories to enhance your cybersecurity.

We all can get too wrapped up in our daily work, chores, and thoughts. Often times, it results in us forgetting to renew stuff, like the Windows Admin Center certificate, for example. Luckily, renewing it and updating it in the WAC itself takes just a few moments.

It’s always the hardest to start something but, once you do, it’s all downhill from there. Then again, you may need some encouragement and guidance to begin. Microsoft Azure is a multi-dimensional cloud service of a grand scale and getting to know it may seem intimidating. But there’s an option to start free to get the hang of it.

Just as VMware’s Project Pacific implies, the plans for the further submergence into the world of containerized applications for vSphere clusters intends to deepen. VMware Tanzu Mission Control is to allow admins to manage Kubernetes clusters regardless of their residential environment. The tool is rumored to become the single base of all K8s cluster operations.

If you want your IT infrastructure to go virtual, you need to know all the angles. However good your hypervisor may be, there’s always a catch. In this case, the potential of VMware ESXi doesn’t matter if the hardware is not up to date. For the highest performance possible, learn a few fine-tuning tricks!

Managing various operations in a virtualized environment usually calls for multiple tabs, each conforming to separate activities. Simplifying these operations and integrating them into a single GUI saves much time and effort to deal with other pressing matters. Windows Virtual Desktop can help you achieve just that from any host OS via Microsoft Azure.

Managing queries across various Microsoft 365 services can be somewhat challenging. The interaction across these applications in your cluster should be prioritized to ensure smooth workload. One handy tool to do that is Microsoft Graph Explorer, which exposes REST APIs and client libraries to access data on the aforementioned services.

In Part I of this article, we discussed how to handle multiple SSL sites sharing the same IP address and port bound to multiple SSL certificates in regards to SNI decryption and re-encryption with Kemp LoadMaster. We discussed briefly how to achieve this creatively. With Kemp LoadMaster, you will need to leverage sub-virtual services (SubVSs) in combination with content rules to handle this scenario. We also use SSL decryption and re-encryption in order to support the clients and servers with different TLS versions. Re-encryption is handled at the virtual service (VS) level, not at the SubVS level. Meaning you can only enter one SNI name for re-encryption with a shared VIP. So, in the case of two or more SSL sites sharing the same IP address, you would have only one that works.