Nowadays, every company is doing its best to protect its data, which is pretty much its most valuable asset. As you know, data is vulnerable to unauthorized access and that’s when Microsoft BitLocker saves the day. BitLocker is the encryption technology from Microsoft, which makes possible to encrypt the Logical Volume on the transparent blade-based level (not physical disk). In this article, we will see how to encrypt Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) using Microsoft BitLocker to protect your data against unauthorized access.

Using the Azure Backup features for your on-premises platform is a great way to start introducing your organization into cloud services. So, if you haven’t explored the service yet, this is a good option since it should not be disruptive with your current backup process or any critical service you are providing. In this article, we’ll review a simple step-by-step process to set a System State backup of one of your on-premises machines to Microsoft Azure.

There’s, probably, no IT administrator who hasn’t heard of SMB3 (Server Message Block). is an application-layer network protocol, developed by Microsoft mostly to provide shared access to the files, and allowing communication between nodes. SMB has been designed as a tool for the creation of a DOS-based network file system, but Microsoft took the initiative and renamed SMB into CIFS later on (Common Internet File System) and continued further developing it. The second version – SMB 2.0, has been introduced in Windows Vista with a wide range of new features, thus it became clear that Microsoft was working hard to improve this protocol.

Microsoft operating systems and server applications are becoming increasingly dependent on proper time synchronization. A skewed system clock can affect your ability to log on, can cause problems with mail flow in Exchange, and be the source of a great many difficult-to-locate problems. To compound matters, the default method of handling time synchronization within a Windows network isn’t exactly reliable or even predictable. If a Hyper-V host’s clock becomes out of sync, it usually affects all of its virtual machines, sometimes catastrophically. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much work to get everything in sync.

Microsoft continues to invest and expand its PowerShell Scripting Environment but sometimes it is necessary to use a graphical interface in order to manage systems. This is the reason why Microsoft also develops a new management tool called “Project Honolulu”. Honolulu is the modern evolution of traditional MMC, first introduced in 2000. Now, it’s time to update our management tools! In this article, I will describe how to download and install Honolulu.

In the previous article, we have covered the basics of Microsoft Windows Server Core installation. After configuring the operating system and specifying the networks and storage for the future configuration, there are few more things left.

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.

Last year I have written a topic on Starwind to create VMs from PowerShell. That enables to automate the creation process without using a GUI, either from Virtual Machine Manager or Hyper-V Manager. But a VM deployment is not finished when the VM is created but when the application is deployed. Before deploying the application, the OS must also be installed and specialized. This topic shows you the method I use to deploy and specialize a VM without a single click.

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).