Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Managing and sharing your VMs across different subscriptions in the cloud is necessary for having a flexible routine. Azure Shared Image Gallery is one such tool that enables that process. With it, you can manage VM images, deploy them across the world, perform versioning and grouping of images, and share them across subscriptions.

These days, you can never be too sure when it comes to cybersecurity. Updating your policies is key to avoid unnecessary exposure. Checking up your old passwords, on-premises and in the cloud, is crucial as well. To enforce that, Azure AD password protection uses both the global and custom banned-password lists.

You can’t have it all, and this is true even for the best things in life. It’s possible to schedule automatic shutdowns of VMs in Azure (one of the ways to cut Azure costs). But you can’t use the same Azure Portal to schedule their automatic boot-up the same way. A way out of it is to use PowerShell, however, there’s another trick you might like better.

Just earlier this April, Microsoft released an update for their Windows Virtual Desktop. Among others, the novelty includes a new graphical interface directly in the Azure port. Unfortunately, it seems like this is just a teaser though: the feature is currently available in Preview, only US regions are available through this portal. You can’t migrate there yet.

All good things come to an end, and so, sadly, has the previous way of updating your Azure Automation modules. Previously, you’d just click on the respective button to update and that would be it. Microsoft deprecated that option and now you may be seeing a weird message with instructions on how to proceed with the issue today.

Working for an MSP demands a lot of toggling between browsers. For each separate tenancy, managing Azure resources demands multiple browsers and tabs. Thankfully, this turmoil has been solved: Azure Lighthouse comes to save the day. You can now allocate customer Azure resources and manage permissions from a single console!

You can still keep VM templates in a separate folder, working with them individually. Or you can use Content Library in vSphere 7.0 along with Check-in and Check-out. In the updated suite, you can use versioning, manage your templates, and keep track. With these new options, you can revert to the exact version from the list or just delete it.

Virtualization of your work servers is a necessary action, but the problem is when you do that, you basically put all your eggs in one basket. Let’s imagine that your Hyper-V host with several VMs on it requires rebooting. Well, in that case, you won’t be able to boot a specific VM until the host OS is restarted, and all VMs are booted. And there’s no guarantee they will be available after that! Now, that surely doesn’t sound too good. However, luckily there are ways to make this process less painful and more efficient. While configuring Hyper-V host, you’ll have to be able to boot your VMs in a specific order. I gotta admit, even though it took me a while to figure out how to customize this process, I have some results for you. Mind, even if your server OS isn’t prone to failure, it’ll still be wise to configure Hyper-V automatic start action for VMs. One way or another, someday, you’ll have to reboot your server. So, when such a reboot occurs, it would’ve been nice if you didn’t have to boot ever separate VM manually, don’t you think so?

Part 2 of the topic explained how to configure the AWS Elastic Beanstalk (EB) environment and the Django project to use the Postgres database. The current third installment will focus on configuring S3 storage for static and media files, as well as assigning a custom domain name for the app.