Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

It’s usually quite a chore to manage file servers by using VMs. Migrating between file servers in the cloud, enacting replication with DFS-R, and such would require using redundancy mechanisms. All this makes the implementation of file servers in Azure unnecessarily complex. Well, that ship has finally sailed!

When people think “cybersecurity,” images will be the last thing to come to mind. Usually, users tend to focus on things like cyber-attacks, viruses, or malware. Well, regular images, depending on where they come from, their integrity, and the routing can become a micro-gap in your security which can then result in a breach.

Veeam Backup and Replication 10 has just recently been released, and one of its more exciting features is the ability to back up a NAS. The latter is frequently used for diverse workloads, which include huge amounts of unstructured data. It’s often served chaotically, and it’s in a risk of being lost if there’s no specific fast redundancy mechanism in place.

Each new VMware vSphere release introduces new features and functions in addition to fixing the drawbacks that may have been in the previous version. With each new one, you need to upgrade VMware Tools in all your VMs and check if you need to upgrade their VM compatibility, otherwise they won’t have access to the desired perks.

Bypassing conjunctions with public networks is easier said than done. Especially, if your endpoints are in faraway regions or even have different tenants, keeping the bandwidth high and cybersecurity tight can be an issue. Microsoft introduced Azure Private Link specifically for that reason, allowing users to create private endpoints within their virtual network.

Content delivery networks (CDN) cover a set of network servers distributed across farther areas. The idea is to have point-of-presence (POP) servers in edge locations. That way, you can cache your web application content in designated servers to have your users enjoy it at high bandwidth. Azure CDN is one such tool that can help you with that.

Using containers to host software processes or applications is starting to become more of a thing. They have the necessary binary code, executables, configuration files, and libraries but without the OS images. They’re lightweight, portable, have a more consistent operation. One has to start somewhere, and AZK is a great container orchestrator to help you with that.