Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

While writing my previous article, I remembered the days when I was only building my first lab. It was a bit tough, you know, as vSphere yet was a black box for me. Those thoughts brought me to the idea of writing this article. The article in which I share my know-how of building a minimalistic lab using… only a PC, switch, and laptop. I’ve divided this topic into 2 parts as I am unsure whether you guys like long-reads. In this part, I discuss how to build an ESXi environment using PC and ESXi 6.7 U1. The next article addresses creating a lab using PC and VMware Workstation 15 Pro. I hope that both of them will be really handy for you!

The flawless operation of your Office 365 infrastructure directly depends on the updates installed on time. An SSL certificate provides secure communication between Office 365 components. If it expires, your infrastructure becomes unprotected. This is where the Azure AD Connect tool comes in. With its help, you can update the SSL certificate for both AD FS and WAP Servers quickly and easily.

If you are a VMware vSphere administrator who wants to solve the problem of a low network throughput, Network I/O Control (NIOC) is exactly what you need! It’s a traffic-specific vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) mechanism of network bandwidth regulation that was firstly introduced in vSphere 4.1 in 2010. NIOC appeared when 10G networking was increasingly prevalent and became a real breakthrough. With this mechanism, you can ensure high network throughput and go with fewer network adapters in ESXi hosts. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

It is never superfluous to provide an extra level of protection for your data and privacy in management. The Microsoft platform allows users to register and manage their applications, have a set of identifiers, and access their data 24/7. Creating a user with Azure Function will allow you to secure your data and provide private access to applications. Ensure information privacy right now!

Some time ago, VMware released VMware vSphere 6.7 U1. You know, I am really happy to, finally, find some time to take a thorough look at it. vSphere 6.7 U1 is the most up-to-date version of this virtualization platform so far, thus it is good to know its new features to predict what to expect of the upcoming versions. Well, I guess that this article is kinda of a long read. Honestly, I could not make it shorter as I wanted it to provide the entire picture of changes that were brought to vSphere 6.7 platform with U1. I hope you like it.

There are many anti-spam tools. And they are pretty good. For example, better-known and reliable domains can be added to your whitelist. However, spoofed emails will always be redone because they represent legitimate business emails. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is a mechanism that will protect your email box and will allow you to get rid of annoying spam, ensuring verification of the sender’s domain. Stop spam emails right now!

After rolling out Windows Server 2019 and Windows Admin Center a month ago, Microsoft said that both were designed with ongoing popularity of all-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments in mind. This being said, let’s talk about the new multifunctional Azure Network Adapter! As you know, large workloads require good connections to VMs in Azure. This can be accomplished by using things like Site-to-Site VPN, Azure Express Route, or Point-to-Site VPN. Here, Azure Network Adapter comes into the play, allowing to connect VMs to the Azure Virtual Network just in one (or two) clicks!

In order to build your own Hyper-V lab in Azure, you need two Hyper-V instances. But, hey, why do we need Hyper-V Replica here? This technology allows you to shift a virtual machine from a server on-prem to Microsoft Azure for maxing out your services uptime. With Hyper-V Replica, returning your services back to the normal functioning becomes a matter of only a few seconds… Looks like a must-have for your Hyper-V environment, doesn’t it?

If you work with Azure close enough, you’ve probably have heard of Nested Virtualization. Yes, it is the feature allowing you to run Hyper-V inside an Azure VM. Why does one need that thing? Well, to build a perfect lab for demos, development, testing, whatever… without buying any extra hardware!