Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

As of today, there’s no doubt of virtualization being the most discussed and developed aspect in the modern IT sphere. Therefore, engineers nowadays face more and more tasks that require quite specific knowledge, and there’s no way to avoid that. Case in point: just lately, I had to transform a few Windows Server 2016 R2 bare-metal servers (one of them was the domain controller) into VMs. UEFI served as a boot sector for every single one of them, which, as you can guess, was another obstacle.

Part 1 of this topic covered why using AWS Elastic Beanstalk (EB) can be more beneficial for making apps if you are using Django. It showcased how to prepare your Django project for correct deployment via AWS EB. Part 2 will explain how to configure the EB environment and the Django project to use Postgres database.

Online activities using malware and viruses increase exponentially every year. Even the smallest mishaps in cybersecurity policies may result in substantial damage. Therefore, who / how / and the way someone accesses your virtual machines is also important. Fortunately, Microsoft created a tool that allows using Azure RBAC and AD Conditional Access to control all of that. Read the guide by Nicolas Prigent, a Swiss Systems Engineer, to learn how to use Azure Active Directory to sign in to your VMs so that other Azure security tools are involved in the process.

Recently at my job, I was faced with a task to develop a file server explicitly suited for the requirements of the company. Needless to say, any configuration of a kind depends on what the infrastructure needs. So, drawing from my personal experience and numerous materials on the web, I came up with the combination FreeBSD+SAMBA+AD as the most appropriate. This combination is a harmonic addition to the existing network configuration since and enables admins with a broad range of possibilities for access control in Windows-based infrastructures. Also, Samba allows you to apply its network resources for Windows client OSs without any additional configurations required. Moreover, FreeBSD is well-documented.

Keeping your credentials and online behavior safe is key to upholding corporate cybersecurity. But the number of applications that are used on-premises and in the Web grow every day. Such conditions require employees to have various access identities with different credentials. Consequently, it causes unnecessary work complexity and potential online threats. Read the article by Romain Serre about using Azure AD Connect to synchronize identities across your on-premises and web application directories to enhance your cybersecurity.

We all can get too wrapped up in our daily work, chores, and thoughts. Often times, it results in us forgetting to renew stuff, like the Windows Admin Center certificate, for example. Luckily, renewing it and updating it in the WAC itself takes just a few moments.

It’s always the hardest to start something but, once you do, it’s all downhill from there. Then again, you may need some encouragement and guidance to begin. Microsoft Azure is a multi-dimensional cloud service of a grand scale and getting to know it may seem intimidating. But there’s an option to start free to get the hang of it.

As you all know, I frequently visit a lot of cloud infrastructure discussion boards, almost as frequently as I see people out there wondering what would be the best way to create a cluster in the Azure portal or configure S2D (Storage Spaces Direct) storage. Therefore, this article will be dedicated to creating a cluster in Azure and configuring S2D on this cluster. I have to warn you that within the article, I’ll use resources that become available after free online registration. Right before we get started, you’ll have to sign in to your Microsoft Azure account. If for some reason, you don’t have a subscription or just don’t want to use your working environment for experimenting, you can get a free account here.

NIC or ports teaming in ESXi allows the hypervisor to share traffic among the physical and virtual networks, thereby increasing the bandwidth of vSphere virtual switch or a group of ports. It allows to load balance network traffic in the event of a hardware or network failure. Configuring the load balancing policy enables you to decide how exactly a standard switch is going to load balance the traffic between the physical NICs. The team load balancing policy specifies how the virtual switch will load balance the traffic between the groups of ports. Nevertheless, there’s, of course, a catch. In case the established load balancing policy doesn’t match the networking equipment your host is connected to, there’ll be problems connecting your recently configured ESXi. The team load balancing policy specifies how the virtual switch will load balance the traffic between the groups of ports. Nevertheless, there’s, of course, a catch. In case the established load balancing policy doesn’t match the networking equipment your host is connected to, there’ll be problems connecting your recently configured ESXi. This is precisely when the ability to configure the load balancing policy through the ESXi console has a moment to shine. It’s even more useful if a host is at a remote location. The point is, a lot of people think that not being able to ping the host is the end of the story. In most cases, this is quite possible, but if you still can console into the ESXi host through out-of-band remote management (IDRAC or else), all is not lost.