Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

For the first time, Microsoft made an online Windows Server Summit at June 26th 2019. Microsoft talked about hybrid cloud, security, cloud native application and hyperconverged solution. Some of the new features which are coming with Windows Server 2019 were unleashed. In this topic, I’d like to summary what are the new features and why you should consider Storage Spaces Direct for a new installation or to update your existing cluster.

If you are an information technology administrator, then by now, you would have known that Microsoft released Cumulative Update 10 for Exchange Server 2016. This update takes Exchange Server 2016 on version number 15.01.1531.003. These latest updates are available now on the download center. These new updates have addressed many issues of the previous versions which range from issues related to security or quality reported by the customers to updates in functionalities. This Exchange Server update also comes with important changes to installation prerequisites.  In today’s post, we will talk about the updated prerequisites, details about this version and how to install the update. So, without any more delay, let us start.

For some reason, VMware Skyline is not common knowledge for VMware vSphere admins and VMware products users on the whole. Skyline is VMware proactive support technology allowing to provide advanced technical support for VMware vSphere products (including vSAN 6.6 and later) and VMware NSX. Soon, some other products will be supported. But wait, what is this service actually for? To make that thing clear for everyone, I’d like to shed light on VMware Skyline in this article.

Leakage of confidential business information can become a true disaster for any company. Therefore, data security is an issue of prime importance for most of companies. Organizing an IT infrastructure, administrators’ top question is how to warrant a secure storage to keep sensitive business information. In this article, I suggest having a closer look at a relatively recent method of ensuring data security – VMware virtual machines encryption that can become a good remedy against intruders for your organization.

Today we will look at one of them – Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol or CHAP. Before we start, let me tell you a few words about CHAP. Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) is a network login protocol that uses a challenge-response mechanism. You can use CHAP authentication to restrict iSCSI access to volumes and snapshots to hosts that supply the correct account name and password (or “secret”) combination. Using CHAP authentication can facilitate management of access controls because it restricts the access through account names and passwords, instead of IP addresses or iSCSI initiator names.

Talking about SQL Server 2016 features, it won’t be fair to leave Always Encrypted aside. This feature prevents your sensitive data from leaking out and enables to get more freedom for your data placement choices. Always Encrypted comes in handy, when, let’s say, you hire external vendors to administer your SQL server and do not want them to see your sensitive data, or when both your client and data are hosted in Azure. So, if you still do not use it, that’s high time to start! Read the full article by Mikhail Rodionov to learn more about SQL Server Always Encrypted benefits and why and when you need it.

Some month ago, Microsoft released a new Azure feature allowing to deploy service catalogs right in the public cloud. What is that thing for? To make teamwork in Azure a breath! Now, thanks to prebuilt templates and controlled parameters, your teams can deploy web apps or VMs so that they won’t break your budget (if you set everything right, of course). Learn how to deploy service catalogs in Azure in the full article by Florent Appointaire.

Microsoft Flow is a handy tool to create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services. It allows you to collect data, sync files, and automate all that boring jobs related to, let’s say, sending emails once a tweet with a buzzword is posted. Find out how to set Microsoft Flow in the full article by Florent Appointaire.

Let’s be honest, any system administrator may face the need of hot-adding the network interfaces to the guest VMs in his Microsoft Hyper-V environment one day. And that’s no problem as Windows Server 2016 brought in a whole set of useful features, one of which is the ability to add and remove network adapters on the running VMs. Moreover, you can do that in two ways – GUI, if you’re looking for a straightforward process and PowerShell if you are a fan of automation.