Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

If you are an information technology administrator, then by now, you would have known that Microsoft released Cumulative Update 10 for Exchange Server 2016. This update takes Exchange Server 2016 on version number 15.01.1531.003. These latest updates are available now on the download center. These new updates have addressed many issues of the previous versions which range from issues related to security or quality reported by the customers to updates in functionalities. This Exchange Server update also comes with important changes to installation prerequisites.  In today’s post, we will talk about the updated prerequisites, details about this version and how to install the update. So, without any more delay, let us start.

For some reason, VMware Skyline is not common knowledge for VMware vSphere admins and VMware products users on the whole. Skyline is VMware proactive support technology allowing to provide advanced technical support for VMware vSphere products (including vSAN 6.6 and later) and VMware NSX. Soon, some other products will be supported. But wait, what is this service actually for? To make that thing clear for everyone, I’d like to shed light on VMware Skyline in this article.

Today we will look at one of them – Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol or CHAP. Before we start, let me tell you a few words about CHAP. Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) is a network login protocol that uses a challenge-response mechanism. You can use CHAP authentication to restrict iSCSI access to volumes and snapshots to hosts that supply the correct account name and password (or “secret”) combination. Using CHAP authentication can facilitate management of access controls because it restricts the access through account names and passwords, instead of IP addresses or iSCSI initiator names.

Talking about SQL Server 2016 features, it won’t be fair to leave Always Encrypted aside. This feature prevents your sensitive data from leaking out and enables to get more freedom for your data placement choices. Always Encrypted comes in handy, when, let’s say, you hire external vendors to administer your SQL server and do not want them to see your sensitive data, or when both your client and data are hosted in Azure. So, if you still do not use it, that’s high time to start! Read the full article by Mikhail Rodionov to learn more about SQL Server Always Encrypted benefits and why and when you need it.

Some month ago, Microsoft released a new Azure feature allowing to deploy service catalogs right in the public cloud. What is that thing for? To make teamwork in Azure a breath! Now, thanks to prebuilt templates and controlled parameters, your teams can deploy web apps or VMs so that they won’t break your budget (if you set everything right, of course). Learn how to deploy service catalogs in Azure in the full article by Florent Appointaire.

Microsoft Flow is a handy tool to create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services. It allows you to collect data, sync files, and automate all that boring jobs related to, let’s say, sending emails once a tweet with a buzzword is posted. Find out how to set Microsoft Flow in the full article by Florent Appointaire.

Let’s be honest, any system administrator may face the need of hot-adding the network interfaces to the guest VMs in his Microsoft Hyper-V environment one day. And that’s no problem as Windows Server 2016 brought in a whole set of useful features, one of which is the ability to add and remove network adapters on the running VMs. Moreover, you can do that in two ways – GUI, if you’re looking for a straightforward process and PowerShell if you are a fan of automation.

These days, businesses do not stick to one location anymore. Such trend pushes companies to build stretched clusters, IT infrastructures spanned across several locations. Such approach enables them to implement better disaster recovery strategies and achieve higher performance. To build such environments, you need fast connection and the solution to use resources of all your remote sites just as they were located in one place. Here, VSAN from StarWind comes into play – the solution for building high performing active-active replicated shared storage.

Find out from the StarWind blog article how to perform Check Disk on Cluster Shared Volume on StarWind VSAN with Failover Cluster ManagerSometimes, you can see an error in Failover Cluster Manager as “Chkdsk scan needed on volume”. It might happen due to some potential problems on a disk. To fix the issue, the system advices you to run a Chkdsk which is the well-known command for every system administrator.