Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

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.

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!

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…

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.

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.