To the extent that the trade press covers, meaningfully, the issues around digital information processing and technology, it tends to focus rather narrowly on the latter:  infrastructure.  The latest hardware innovation — the fastest processor, the slickest server, the most robust hyper-converged infrastructure appliance — tends to be the shiny new thing, hogging the coverage.

There are lots of posts regarding Hyper-V networking. But there doesn’t seem to be a single compiled and up to date guide covering fundamentals and some advanced topics alike. This article aims to fill that gap, without a wall of text but a few easy to understand diagrams, tables, and PowerShell snippets. We will take a look at Hyper-V’s basic networking concept, NIC teaming (Network Interface Card) and different approaches to let VMs (Virtual Machines) talk to specific VLANs or even VLAN trunks. The first article in the Hyper-V Networking 101 series will cover everything you need to know about virtual switches and NICs. The last post is planned as a real-world example: A way to implement a secure Wi-Fi (and/or wired) guest network on top of a virtual firewall.

This article is intended to introduce you to the main concepts and features of Fibre Channel (FC), the high-speed network technology and a relevant family of standards (protocols) for storage networking that was standardized in 1994.

The network component and the troubleshooting that sometimes we need to do represents a big factor on all cloud customers, not matter if you are using Azure, AWS, Office 365 or any other. If you don’t have control over the network and/or you are not capable of identifying issues root causes, then there’s most likely the cloud experience it’s not going to be a good one. Microsoft has that clear and is now offering a new tool to assist customers: Azure Network Watcher.

I am going to try to address a few issues I have seen quite a lot in my virtualization career. It is not that you have to take extra care when virtualizing, but your virtual environment will never be better than the foundation you build it on. The reason you do not see that many people fuss about it in non-virtualized environments (anymore). I believe, that resources are in abundance today. Well, they were so ten years ago as well, but since then we have only seen higher and higher specification on server hardware. It was the reason for starting to virtualize. Do not get me wrong – Lots of people care about the performance of their virtual and physical environments. Yet some have not set them self up for a successful virtualization project. Let me elaborate…

The technology giant Microsoft is, as many other big ones in the market, making a statement regarding CyberSecurity: They are maintaining their $1 billion investment on yearly basis for research and development in this field, which does not include any “inorganic investments” (buying other companies). The latter investments will be a separate budget.

Windows Server 2016 has been released in October 2016 and comes with a new feature called Containers. Containers already exist in Linux world and enable to make OS virtualization. Basically, a container is an isolated place where an application can run without affecting the rest of the system and without the system affecting the application (MSDN definition).

If you’ve been talking to customers about a cloud, no matter what platform, I’m pretty sure that you heard from almost any of them that one of their major concerns about the public cloud paradigm is security. Especially when you are talking to the public sector or private companies, like financial institutions, where their entire business relies on their workloads and users secure environment. Azure Government represents an isolated version of Azure dedicated to these customers, where most of the Azure features are available under strict compliance rules. In order to enhance this service, Microsoft released recently to GA (General Availability) a key component of the Azure Government service: Virtual Cloud Defense (VCD).

Recently, it became known that there is a private, mysterious network stretching between London and Frankfurt that is twice as fast as the normal Internet. The connection, provided by a series of microwave dishes on masts, was completely secret to anyone but one company. Only when a competitor completed its own microwave link between the two cities, the first company revealed that it too had a link between the cities in order to get a share in this potential market. Similar stories can be found all over the world, but because these networks are privately owned, and because they are often used by financial groups trying to find an edge on the stock market and eke out a few extra billions, you have to investigate hard to find them.