Windows 10 Creator Update introduced Quick Create to Hyper-V, the feature allowing to create a custom VM from a Hyper-V Quick Create gallery image. It is a handy tool for testing new software or OS features which developers and guys in QA may enjoy a lot. This being said, I describe today how to create a VM template and add it to a gallery.

Some time ago, I published articles on setting up a home lab using a PC running ESXi and Workstation. We all know that nested virtualization is not an ESXi-only feature; Microsoft Hyper-V also enables us to run VMs inside its VMs. Microsoft’s implementation of this technology is a bit different, but it exists. And, considering that VMware and Microsoft have been competing for a long time, it’s interesting to see what each has to offer for this type of virtualization. In this post, I examine how easy it is to configure a nested virtualization layer inside Hyper-V and vSphere VMs and discuss peculiarities of this process in both environments.

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).

Windows Admin Center (WAC) simplifies Windows server management with user-friendly web tools and seamless Azure integration.

How does it work? Being triggered, the Node Fairness service determines the current workload on the cluster hosts. If needed, it automatically migrates VMs to the less loaded host. After the start, the cluster service checks the host for two factors: If the average host CPU load exceeds the tolerated threshold If the average host memory utilization is higher than the tolerated threshold In case either of these criteria is met, the VM gets live migrated to the less loaded host. Neither guest system nor services do experience any downtime.

Step-by-step instructions on replacing a failed drive in S2D without breaking your cluster or data integrity.

Secret Management is a PowerShell module that enables secure storage and management of credentials, allowing seamless integration with various third-party secret vaults and simplifying script deployment.

Microsoft’s Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) has been a key tool in managing updates across a network for quite some time. As keeping systems updated remains important, Microsoft created a new PowerShell import method that bypasses the issues with the Internet Explorer/Active-X combination.

Every admin knows that maintaining all the local area networks within an IT environment manually is a major headache. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to remedy that by automating a number of functionalities, one of which is command-line shells.