Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

As an admin, I’m fully aware that while working with the virtual infrastructures, plan A doesn’t always relay a guarantee, so you have to have plan B up your sleeve. Microsoft Hyper-V Replica inbuilt technology is a massive help in a lot of cases. If you want to find out more about why exactly this technology is a life-saver in the matters of Hyper-V disaster recovery, look it up here.

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.

As any other admin, you know that the VMs eventually start to suffer from disruptions, performance problems, or simply stop responding. That is a fact of life, unfortunately. Chances are, as a virtualization engineer, you’ve probably already met these problems at least once. And since the virtualized environment is quite a complicated system, there can be too many different reasons or factors that impact poor VM performance. Trying to find out what is wrong can take a lot of your time.

In the previous parts, we talked about general cybersecurity boundaries and staff education on the topic. The third crucial aspect is preparation, which allows minimizing the aftermaths if a cyber-attack does happen. Backups and crisis planning are two key activities that you have to manage so that you can effectively recover in case your cybersecurity is compromised.