Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

You can increase your Azure Portal Security by configuring Conditional Access, an Azure Active Directory (AD) Premium P1 feature, to enforce multi-factor authentication. The feature collects various signals from user IP location to group membership, allows you to see them in real-time, and decide whether to allow or deny application access to AD or allow limited access.

Microsoft has recently added two new features to help with your daily Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) work. The first feature allows you to schedule maintenance windows every week to minimize workload impact. The second one offers different auto-upgrade variations where you can tweak what’ll happen to your existing version, when, and how.

There are various options to ensure backup safety today. The 3-2-1 backup rule (3 copies of data, on 2 different media, 1 of them being off-site) is a must. But it’s not enough. Keeping your backups in an independent network separate from Windows Active Directory, privilege managing, using backup software, like StarWind VTL — these and other extra steps are necessary to ensure thorough data protection.

Automation in daily IT has become a standardized necessity rather than an advantage. Power Automate Desktop builds on the inherent robotic process automation of Power Automate. The solution allows you to automate all of your repetitive desktop processes. But the best thing is that the application is now free for all Windows 10 users!

StarWind V2V Converter / P2V Migrator is a convenient tool for converting and cloning physical machines, virtual disks, and VMs across various scenarios (P2V / V2V / P2C / V2C / C2C). The software solution is free and compatible with all industry-standard hypervisors, like VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen Project, and KVM.

There are many cases that may entail meeting points between Windows and Linux environments. Such may involve enrolling Linux systems into a Windows domain, configuring a Linux domain as a peer to the Windows one, or simply copying information between them. Whatever your goal is, we’ve prepared a clear guide on how to join the two.

Azure Automation Update Management is primarily used for orchestrating Windows Server and Linux updates. But it can also be configured to add target machines or machine groups for updating automatically, using a registry key. One less headache! Otherwise, you’d have to add machines or machines to groups manually.

vSphere 7 Update 2 adds to the functionality of Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), including new capabilities for ESXi lifecycle management at the cluster level. You can now remediate hosts with business priorities and leverage fast upgrades, configure Quick Boot for OEM solutions, upgrade without migrating host VMs, and do other cool stuff.

Windows Sandbox is an application that creates a Windows instance fully separated from the host. It creates an isolated and secure environment where you can run files and applications without affecting the host — great for testing purposes. Once you close the sandbox, everything there is permanently deleted.