Azure Stack HCI cluster is a hybrid solution that successfully units on-premises infrastructure with Azure cloud services, managing both Windows and Linux workloads relatively easily. However, it isn’t without its problems, and most come from incorrect network configurations that decrease performance and increase latency.
Microsoft announced Azure Basic Load Balancer (LB) end-of-life from September 30, 2025. Anyone using that tool will have to migrate to the new Azure Standard LB. There are several prerequisites to be made, as well as associated downtime during migration. The new format of the tool is also for-pay.
Microsoft recently announced Windows Hello for Business Hybrid Cloud Kerberos Trust to help with the complexity of passwordless authentication. It is commonly thought passwords are the weakest link in a company’s cybersecurity posture. While Azure has seen various aspects of passwordless authentication, Windows has been lacking.
While VMware has been overhauling and stepping up in all arias of its vSphere environment over the last decade, it’s been sort of looking over its hypervisor. The recent VMware ESXi 8.0 has seen some new introductions here and there. Most notably, improvements are seen in its installation, configuration, and user interface (UI).
Veeam Backup & Recovery v11 now includes the option to backup data to Google Cloud Storage. This provides more flexibility to users who wish to choose Google over Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, or other public cloud vendors. Such a feature offers further user-friendliness while still abiding by the 3-2-1 backup rule.
Windows 11 2H22 includes several new elements that make its installation into vSphere 8 and then the creation of a VMware Golden Image much easier. Before that, the OS missed some drivers that required more juggling to make things work. Now, it includes the VMware PVSCSI and VMXNET3 drivers and other stuff to fix previous issues.
Business continuity today largely depends on data availability. There are multiple ways Microsoft allows you to achieve that with its Azure cloud services. Among many disaster resistance options, if you use more than one Azure Region, you can use disaster recovery in Azure Site Recovery to replicate your virtual machine (VM) from one region to another.
For some time now, Microsoft has made a single-node configuration available for its cloud service Azure Stack HCI. The name is somewhat misleading since a cluster requires two or more servers to form a group for high availability. Nonetheless, this version is good for dev, test, proof of concept, or initial setup tweaking for further scaling.
vSphere 8 introduces VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), focused on efficiency, performance, and less CPU usage. The new configuration has been optimized for NVMe-based TLC flash devices, abandoning cache layers and disk groups. VMware will privilege the deployments of vSAN as ESA, moving forward.