Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

In our daily work, we do often face a choice between low cost or high reliability. Today, I want to establish whether the game is worth the candle when you want to cut your expenses on important things. The premise is that combining Hyper-V and DC roles on the same bare-metal server is a bad idea.

To begin with, all the suggestions and statements in this material are derived from the personal experience, which means they were tried and tested on practice not once and not even twice. Getting that much into detail is not as significant as delivering you the big picture, so I’m going to concentrate on the latter.

Sometimes, tinkering with configurations and commands can go awry. For example, when you’ve made some modifications to SELinux in a virtual machine (VM) in Azure. Suddenly, “Failed to load SELinux policy, freezing.” pops up. But don’t worry, we’ve got the cure.

Creating apps in Ubuntu that will work seamlessly on different platforms may seem like quite the challenge. Nonetheless, with the right knowledge, you can manage that like a pro. By installing Django on Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS and configuring it to use PostgreSQL (which is focused on SQL standards compliance), you can now easily build apps there using heterogeneous databases.

As the title is speaking for itself, it is quite clear that today, I am going to discuss various methods to open and close firewall ports on ESXi hosts. It is useless to consider whether configuring firewall rules is harmful or not since every admin once in a while meets the necessity of fine-tuning network to distribute access rights. So, you ought to know all the tools at your disposal one way or another.

Not every company owns a sophisticated infrastructure packed with shared storage, virtual SANs, NVMe, etc. Migrating systems, especially VMs, in an average IT environment could create workload disruptions because you’d have to stall other processes. Finally, however, those days are over: vMotion can migrate your VMs while keeping all systems active and operational.

Creating of Windows domain has always been a rock on which admins split. There are ones who will vouch for GUI. The others are more prone to PowerShell use. What do I think? Well, PowerShell is a flexible and universal tool, unlike GUI. So, no wonder this article is dedicated to creating and configuring a domain on Windows Server 2016 via PowerShell exclusively. I want to establish whether it will be helpful in the automation of this whole process.

Microsoft Teams is set to supersede Skype for StaffHub and Business. It’s a powerful tool in itself, so knowing how to make the most of it is crucial for managing your workload organically. Luckily, PowerShell Universal Dashboard can help you monitor your Microsoft Teams Cloud call queues as if they were on the palm of your hand.

Azure Monitor is a feature in Windows Admin Center that is still in preview, but you can make good use of it already. So why wait? Unfortunately, some people have issues with configuring alerts in Azure Monitor and rightfully so: it has to be done through Azure Portal. But don’t fret — it’s going to take you just a few minutes to get into it and set up whatever rules you need.

We often tend to believe that operating systems are secured by default, but securing your Linux servers to protect your data, intellectual property and time is the responsibility of the system administrator.

In this post we will review some of the basics operations that shall always be done while installing a new Linux server. We will use Debian as an example for the different commands but finding the rights commands for RedHat, CentOs or any other Linux distribution should be quite straight forward once you know what you are looking for and what you’d like to achieve.