Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Last year, my colleague asked me for advice. He couldn’t add an iSCSI target, provided by AWS Storage Gateway, on VMware ESXi cluster. So, initially, this material was intended to serve as a manual. However, since I got a similar question once more just recently, I realized that this topic could be interesting to the others as well, which is why I decided to share this guide, hoping it will be useful.

Virtualization was always about making the most out of less. But corporations fighting over customers divided them into incompatible camps. Recently, though, the winds in the industry have changed. VMware just launched an application mobility platform that migrates and re-balances on-premises vSphere and non-vSphere (Hyper-V and KVM) infrastructures to public clouds based on VMware vCloud!

IT infrastructure security is a number one priority, whether it be bare-metal or virtual infrastructure. The matter of safety in a Hyper-V environment, in particular, is one of those things that require attention first and foremost. However, whereas the fundamental aspects of covering the question of protection are widely known, there are always tiny details nobody really pays any attention to. Even experienced IT administrators tend to pass them by. This article takes focus on such issues. Either in a highly virtualized environment or private cloud, every one of them can become crucial.
Admittedly, establishing security baselines in the Hyper-V environment is a sink-or-swim scenario. The primary user concern is the host operating system (OS) and network hardware: you simply cannot maintain security on a proper level with only one product active. The safety of the Hyper-V environment requires a complex set of measures, including but not limited to constant monitoring of services and equipment.
All your virtual machines (VMs) and resources are dependent on the hypervisor. If someone takes control of it, you can say goodbye to all your data. That is why Hyper-V security is essential. Check out potentially dangerous mistakes listed in this article while setting up and maintaining network hardware, host OS, and your Hyper-V environment so that it won’t be infected with ransomware.

Perfection knows no limits and so does Windows Server. Microsoft is on a crusade of ever-perfecting it, and the new version has something to say, indeed. It seems like the company might be coming after virtualization vendors. Why? Well, some of the new features include storage migration, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, and ReFS deduplication… Just saying…

At the beginning of the week, a customer asks me how he can migrate resource group from one subscription to another. He had a CSP contract and he needed to deploy “Bring-your-own-Licenses” products that were not available in CSP. So, he subscribed to an EA contract. Then he wanted to move resources from CSP to EA. However, he had a lot of dependent resources inside several resource groups. This topic shows you how to make this migration.

Even if you know all the backup ways and methods, you can always open a door to new knowledge. This time we’re talking about backing up Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), namely creating VM disk snapshots in order to back up a disk manually. But even in this process, you can get automation. How?

Seeing the full picture of how well your Azure is faring can be complicated. It can be quite problematic to consolidate its workloads visually into comprehensive documentation. Subsequently, the reports to customers on the cloud’s effectiveness can come out as too cumbersome. It can also be hard for your team and partners to assess its input into your business’ IT environment overall.