Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

The virtualization world keeps on driving at full speed. VMware recently released a big pack of upgrades to its Tools. Among others, the most interesting updates relate to certain critical vulnerabilities, support for new guest OS products, and, what’s really nice, backward compatibility capabilities with older VMware products.

Connecting Azure Active Directory (AD) joined VMs to Azure Virtual Desktop (VD) is a sure-fire way to simplify environment operation in your VDI. This way, you can skip your Azure VMs having line-of-sight of on-prem or virtualized AD Domain Controller (DC), deploying AD Domain Services, and sometimes its can even remove the need for DC entirely. Less complication, more efficiency.

There are many “moving parts” to cybersecurity, among which, encryption is on the frontline. Previously, you’d have to use a third-party key management solution to facilitate security in a vSphere environment. Now, you can use Native Key Provider to integrate vSAN encryption, VM encryption, and virtual Trusted Platform Modules (vTPM).

VMware App Volumes is a software solution meant to deliver ready-to-use apps right to the users’ VMs, providing them with instant access to the required application. Formerly belonging to the CloudVolumes, it was released as the part of VMware Horizon line to decouple package management and delivery. Packaging once and deploying everywhere, VMware App Volumes brings the user experience to the whole new level.

VMware OS Optimization Tool (OSOT) is a neat piece of software to optimize your on-prem or cloud OS. Originally designed for VMware Horizon, OSOT is fully applicable to Windows desktop and Windows Server. It allows to eliminate unneeded settings, switch off features, clean up older junk from your OS, and otherwise enhance its functionality.

Windows 365 is Microsoft’s recent twist on virtual desktop infrastructure. Microsoft also calls it “your PC in the cloud.” Initially, Windows 365 wasn’t able to work with only Azure Active Directory (AD), requiring Hybrid AD Join. Now, this has been simplified, so you can easily connect your Windows 365 “PCs in the cloud” to “Azure AD only” in just a few steps.

Kerberos is an authentication protocol that has been around since Windows Server 2000. It is the gold standard for on-premises Active Directory authentication. Azure, however, didn’t support it. To further enhance the security and interoperability of its environments, Microsoft announced changes to Kerberos and its Azure Active Directory compatibility.

You may need your Sentinel logs in long-term retention based on government requirements. Azure Log Analytics starts charging for such retention after 90 days have elapsed. However, you can use a Playbook that creates an Azure Storage account and, after 90 days, automatically moves such logs to cold storage to avoid retention billing.

Microsoft constantly evolves and changes, and so do its products and features. This is especially relevant for the continuous expansion of Azure cloud and its hybrid cloud capabilities. This time, we’ll talk about the changes in names and functionality when it comes to products previously known under the Azure Defender and Sentinel umbrellas.