Hyper-V passthrough disks can be tricky to manage, but with the right approach, you can avoid downtime and data loss. Our latest guide provides a simple, step-by-step walkthrough for configuring and migrating these disks.

Set up your Hyper-V environment to boot VMs in the correct order every time, keeping dependent services happy and downtime minimal.

Today, I’ll talk about a thing that any sysadmin running Hyper-V VMs does (or still dreams about) while managing infrastructure resources: hot modifying assigned to VM memory amount. I’ll discuss not only the feature itself but also how it works on different OS and its impact on the environment stability. All of us keep an eye on resource consumption within our environments. If a VM needs extra RAM to have the job done, we provide it with some, right? And, we usually run many VMs on our servers each with own purpose and configuration. That’s, actually, why changing the amount of assigned to a VM memory without rebooting it may come in handy. Also, many guys run some parts of their environments on Windows while having other parts run on something from Linux family. Looks pretty hectic in terms of management, doesn’t it?

Learn how to create a fresh AD domain with nothing but PowerShell. Ideal for scripting your lab or production setup quickly.

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.

Keeping APIs updated across platforms is tough, but SwaggerHub and Azure API Management make it easier.

In my today’s topic, I discuss why PowerShell behaves like that. Specifically, I shed light on why you cannot run scripts or access a computer on a different domain. Also, I’ll take a closer look at how some cmdlets work.

While extending a VMDK file is a fairly easy task that can be performed right in Disk Manager, shrinking a virtual disk is a bit tricky. And, you need to be really careful because unless done properly, reducing virtual disk size may cause data loss! Sure, you can just use VMware Converter to make a VMDK smaller, but, for my money, it is always better to have a script at hand. In this article, I’ll discuss how to shrink virtual disks with 2 simple PowerShell scripts.

From day to day, admins troubleshoot issues remotely. And, pretty often, they cannot count on another guy who helps them to enable Remote Desktop (RD) on the remote host. There may also be the case when you loose the access to RD on another computer for some reason, and there’s no one in the remote office who can help you. Whatever, I hope you got the point. What do you need to do? Sure, you can just ask a fellow admin to enable RD on the remote host and wait a bit, but what if that’s something really urgent and you are to fix that issue in the middle of the night? Let’s think through what you can do in that case.