Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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.

As an admin, I often have to deal with the necessity to transfer large OVF and ISO files or even move virtual machines (VMs) between ESXi hosts that have poor network performance or disposed in different locations with no network connection whatsoever. If a case like this occurs, a USB flash drive or USB external drive is a way to go. More specifically, you can use a drive in two different ways (by the way, both authors have my most sincere regards and appreciation for presenting these methods in a most coherent and simultaneously simple way). The first one is to copy files from a USB device to a host directly through SSH session without changing drive format as the following article suggests. However, such an approach has some issues, the most tedious one being maximum file size limitations, which certainly limits its use for larger files. You cannot work with the Graphical user interface (GUI) as well. Instead, you gotta use SSH and dive deep into the host data storage system, so you can figure I am a much bigger fan of a second way: creating a VMFS datastore on a USB drive. You can connect it to ESXi hosts and transfer files from one to another (or just store a temporary copy on an external storage device).

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.

Hyperconvergence has dramatically transformed data center landscape over the past few years. New technologies are being developed, good old ones are being improved… We live in exciting times! And as data centers are becoming more reliable and powerful, it is important to get more out of the hardware in use: nobody likes to leave money on the table! Intel, Mellanox and StarWind have teamed up to develop a Hyper-V highly available cluster where you’ll get awesome performance without compromising ease of manageability of the environment. This article discusses the measurements in brief, showcasing the recent results.

Tracing your Azure’s health can be quite a challenge. Tons of daily entries delete, update, or create resources in the cloud, and some of these changes may result in a crash. For administrators, identifying which entry caused the error amidst the usual chaotic activity logs can be a problem, which may lead to severe downtime. Luckily, Log Analytics can help you solve such issues in no time.

In times when computing technology is moving by leaps and bounds, cloud migration happens quite often. While completely common, this process carries some dangers, such as web applications safety. It becomes an issue since you expose your sites publicly. However, if you move your servers to Azure, this won’t be a problem!