Hi everyone! Brandon Wilson here once again with this month’s “Check This Out!” (CTO!) guide.
These posts are only intended to be your guide, to lead you to some content of interest, and are just a way we are trying to help our readers a bit more, whether that is learning, troubleshooting, or just finding new content sources! We will give you a bit of a taste of the blog content itself, provide you a way to get to the source content directly, and help to introduce you to some other blogs you may not be aware of that you might find helpful.
From all of us on the Core Infrastructure and Security Tech Community blog team, thanks for your continued reading and support!
Title: How to Use TSSv2 to Collect Data and Analyze to Solve High CPU Issues
Source: Ask the Performance Team
Author: Denzel Maxey
Publication Date: January 20, 2023
Content excerpt:
Hello everyone, this is Denzel Maxey with the Windows Performance Team. I found a tool that actively collects different data based on scenarios and streamlines the data collection process. Drumroll – introducing TSSv2 (Troubleshooting Support Script). In my job, I see a lot of High CPU cases and collecting an ETL trace using TSSv2 with Xperf aka WPR for high CPU has been fundamental in resolving issues.
I’d like to share some instructions, methods, and just insight on the tools in general that should be able to empower IT professionals resolve issues. This post will show how the TSSv2 tool can work with the Windows Performance Recorder. Tssv2 also works with several tools as it is very powerful but will focus on collecting a WPR trace using TSSv2 when regarding a case of High CPU.
Title: Automation for Large Scale Deployment of Agents on Servers Managed by Azure Arc
Source: Azure Arc
Author: Kritika Gupta
Publication Date: January 12, 2023
Content excerpt:
There is a growing need for the deployment of tools or agents on on-premise servers in bulk. Its highly time consuming to manually deploy the agent in bulk.
Microsoft Azure uses Azure Arc for the agents/tools/application deployments and can be combined with Azure policy for large scale mass deployment. In the below usecase Log Analytics and Dependency agents pushed via the policy.
Title: Secure, Scalable, and Simple Onboarding to Azure Arc-Enabled Servers Using Group Policy
Source: Azure Arc
Author: aurnovcy
Publication Date: January 31, 2023
Content excerpt:
Whether its Microsoft Defender for Cloud’s Security Posture Management capabilities or Azure Automanage Machine Configuration’s Guest-OS level governance capabilities or Update Management Center’s patching capabilities, Azure Arc-enabled servers helps customers achieve consistent security and compliance across their hybrid infrastructure. With thousands of servers spread across subsidiaries and environments, it can be challenging to have the asset inventory needed to onboard to Azure Arc. Yet one solution, a favorite among our customers, most often traverses across disparate environments. You guessed it, that solution is Active Directory. Using Active Directory’s Group Policy engine, IT admins can point and click to onboard hundreds or even thousands of servers to Azure Arc.
Title: Part 3: Architectural Cost Optimisation – Practical Design Steps for Architects and Developers
Source: Azure Architecture
Author: Shane Baldacchino
Publication Date: January 4, 2023
Content excerpt:
In part 3 of this multi-part blog series, I am going to cover, as per the title ‘Architectural Cost Optimisation’.
In prior posts I have spoken about foundational primitives, what you can change and tune in the cloud without changing your applications.
But you know what? Architectures can evolve, and they should evolve fueled by business efficiency and cost savings.
If you are an architect or developer joining us today, you are unbelievably lucky because with every day you get new levers to pull.
Title: OT Cloud Enablement – Azure Active Directory Tenant
Source: Azure Architecture
Author: Johan Grant
Publication Date: January 4, 2023
Content excerpt:
Today we are going a little deeper into what was discussed in the OT Cloud Enablement - Cloud Adoption Models article by exploring Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant design considerations for an OT environment. Once the Azure AD tenant design has been finalised, decisions on Identity and Access Management (IAM), network topology and connectivity, resource organisation, security, management, governance and, platform automation and DevOps can then be made.
Title: Stream Data to Your Data Lake Using Azure Data Explorer
Source: Azure Architecture
Author: sqlzack
Publication Date: January 18, 2023
Content excerpt:
Microsoft Azure Data Explorer is a great resource to ingest and process streaming data. Azure Data Lake Storage is a great resource for storing large amounts of data. The end-to-end conceptual architecture contained in the GitHub Repository accompanying this blog focuses on deploying an environment that plays to the strengths of both of these services by using Azure Synapse Analytics to simulate streaming data to them. In this architecture, the core strength of Azure Data Explorer is performant real-time storage and analytics. The core strength of Azure Data Lake Storage is cost-effective and efficient long-term storage.
Title: Announcing Public Preview: Azure Change Tracking & Inventory using Azure Monitor agent (AMA)
Source: Azure Governance and Management
Author: Swati Devgan
Publication Date: January 17, 2023
Content excerpt:
The Change Tracking and Inventory service tracks changes to Files, Registry, Software, Services and Daemons and uses the MMA (Microsoft Monitoring Agent)/OMS (Operations Management Suite) agent. This preview supports the new AMA agent and enhances the following:
- Security/Reliability and Scale - The Azure Monitor Agent enhances security, reliability, and facilitates multi-homing experience to store data.
- Simplified onboarding- You can onboard to Virtual Machines directly to Change Tracking (add link) without needing to configure an Automation account. In new experience, there is
- Rules management – Uses Data Collection Rules to configure or customize various aspects of data collection. For example, you can change the frequency of file collection. DCRs let you configure data collection for specific machines connected to a workspace as compared to the "all or nothing" approach of legacy agents.
Title: Azure Portal December 2022 Updates
Source: Azure Governance and Management
Author: Allison Cordle
Publication Date: January 31, 2023
Content excerpt:
Building on the initial Azure AD Mobile experience, a new release in December 2022 introduces more user capabilities. This includes enabling users to view their extended profile details and sign-in logs, view other users extended details, search for users within the active tenant, and inviting guest users.
All of these capabilities are contingent on the user having the correct level of permissions to do so. The next release, targeted for late February, will introduce more capabilities for groups.
Title: Become More Resilient By Gaining Skills on Azure Data Backup & Recovery
Source: Azure Infrastructure
Author: Lanna Teh
Publication Date: January 23, 2023
Content excerpt:
Analysts estimate the financial cost of downtime due to an IT outage at hundreds of thousand dollars an hour, depending on company size. Aside from monetary damage, any unexpected outage can also result in loss of data, reduced employee productivity, and can become an overall impediment to your company’s business progress. It’s critical to back up your data regularly and be vigilant of any new threats so that your business can continue running unimpeded.
Title: Monitoring Azure VMware Solution with Log Analytics
Source: Azure Migration and Modernization
Author: Varun Hariharan
Publication Date: January 19, 2023
Content excerpt:
A global enterprise wants to migrate thousands of VMware vSphere virtual machines (VMs) to Microsoft Azure as part of their application modernization strategy. Their first step is to exit their on-premises data centers and rapidly relocate their legacy application VMs to the Azure VMware Solution as a staging area for the first phase of their modernization strategy. What should the Azure VMware Solution look like?
Title: Deploy Azure Firewall to Inspect Traffic to a Private Endpoint
Source: Azure Network Security
Author: Gustavo Modena
Publication Date: January 12, 2023
Content excerpt:
Preventing sensitive data, such as customer personal records like Date of Birth or SSN, from traversing the internet helps you maintain compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and payment card industry (PCI). It is critical for customers in the financial services, healthcare, and government sectors. Azure Private Link, when combined with Azure Firewall, ensures sensitive traffic not only stays on the Azure network but is also monitored, audited, and secured.
Title: AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server 2023-01-30 Update
Source: Azure Stack
Author: Sarah Cooley
Publication Date: January 31, 2023
Content excerpt:
I'm so excited to share our first release of 2023! This release is jam-packed with new pre-checks before install, improvements to Windows Admin Center flows, and we published a ton of great documentation over the winter holiday. In case you were wondering about the release name, we're moving to year-month-day release names to align with AKS in Azure more closely.
Before getting into the update details, we have a few Announcements:
- If you shut down your AKS clusters over the holiday or skipped the November update, you may have internal certificates that expired. Follow these steps to recover your AKS cluster from expired certificates.
- We are retiring AKS hybrid builds that are more than a year old. Please upgrade to our new release (or at least something newer than March '22) and remember to update cluster Kubernetes versions. Supported Kubernetes versions for AKS hybrid
Title: Accelerate Your Azure Cloud Management Using Azure Cloud Shell with Predictive IntelliSense
Source: Azure Tools
Author: Jason Helmick
Publication Date: January 24, 2023
Content excerpt:
We have heard feedback that with so many commands it can be challenging to remember the exact syntax or learn new cmdlets, so we are enabling a solution to make the experience easier.
We are excited to announce that we have enabled Predictive IntelliSense in PSReadLine and the predications from Azure PowerShell Az.Tools.Predictor module.
Beginning February 2023 Azure Cloud Shell uses the version of PSReadLine that has Predictive IntelliSense enabled by default. We've also installed and enabled the Azure PowerShell predictor Az.Tools.Predictor module. Together, these changes enhance the command-line experience by providing suggestions that help new and experienced users of Azure discover, edit, and execute complete PowerShell commands.
Title: Reducing the Size of Windows Server Container Images – Part 1
Source: Containers
Author: Akarsh Mishra
Publication Date: January 10, 2023
Content excerpt:
One of the most significant pain points for Windows Server Container customers is the size of the container images. These images have historically been quite large, resulting in long download times and impacting available disk space. We have made improvements to these image sizes over time, but thus far, these improvements haven't materially improved the customer experience. Today, we're happy to report some significant improvements in this area.
Title: Windows 10 or Windows 11 GPO ADMX – An Update
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Helmut Wagensonner
Publication Date: January 1, 2023
Content excerpt:
In a former blog (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/core-infrastructure-and-security/windows-10-or-windows-11-gpo...), where I did a comparison between Windows 10 and Windows 11 ADMX files, I promised in my comments to do a follow-up when both 22H2 ADMX versions are finalized.
A couple of weeks after the ADMX files for both versions were available for download, I did another comparison. I used the Windows 10 October 2022 ADMX files vs. Windows 11 September 2022 templates. Still, we have differences between the two versions. I did not compare the diffs from the old blog with the current ones, so I cannot tell if the number of distinctions has increased, but after a short peek it seems that not too much has changed. I did a file comparison of both versions and created an Excel table, which is partly reflected in the table further down below this article.
Title: Switch to the New Defender for Storage Pricing Plan
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Felipe Binotto
Publication Date: January 8, 2023
Content excerpt:
If you missed, a new pricing plan has been announced for Microsoft Defender for Storage.
The legacy pricing plan (per-transaction) is priced at $0.02 per 10K transactions, which can become a bit expensive if the Storage Account has a very large number of transactions.
Title: How to Manage Microsoft Defender on Windows Server via Intune
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Atil Gurcan
Publication Date: January 12, 2023
Content excerpt:
As companies adopt Microsoft Defender, there are certain questions coming from customers in terms of EPP management. These questions are mostly focusing on Microsoft Defender management in Windows Servers. I’d like to touch base on different management options for different customer scenarios.
Title: Public and Private AKS Clusters Demystified
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Houssem Dellai
Publication Date: January 16, 2023
Content excerpt:
The control plane is critical and is fully managed by Azure. By default, it is exposed on a public endpoint accessible over the internet. It could be secured using authentication and authorization using Azure AD for example. It does also support whitelisting only specific IP ranges to connect to it.
But for organizations who want to disable this public endpoint, they can leverage the private cluster feature.
AKS supports 4 access options to the control plane:
- public cluster
- private cluster
- public cluster with API Integration enabled
- private cluster with API Integration enabled
This article will explain these 4 options showing the architectural implementation for each one.
This does not cover scenarios where a user accesses an application through public Load Balancer or Ingress Controller.
Title: Capturing MDE Client Analyzer Results to Azure Log Analytics Workspace
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Curtis Ricard and Todd Linke
Publication Date: January 17, 2023
Content excerpt:
We’re excited to write this post because we (well…mostly Todd) wrote a script that was helpful in debugging Windows Defender onboarding issues for a customer we work with. The script was written because the customer was having difficulty understanding why specific devices failed to onboard, and it was helpful in gathering data from multiple devices so that the customer could identify trends, common failures, etc. and address them at greater scale.
The script may be used to capture output results of the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) Client Analyzer, as well as some other settings, and upload the results to a Log Analytics workspace in Azure Monitor. This allows for analysis from a central point via the Kusto Query Language (KQL). The script can be found on GitHub – see MDE_Automation.
Title: How To Automate The Hybrid World Part One Of Two
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Jonas Ohmsen
Publication Date: January 23, 2023
Content excerpt:
Over the years Microsoft has developed more and more automation tools such as Power Automate, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions or Azure Automation. While Azure Automation is not the latest tool in the automation tools family, I dedicate this blog to this amazing tool and hopefully provide you with an easy-to-follow how-to guide.
Title: Customer Offerings: Security: Microsoft Defender - Advanced Dashboards with Power BI
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Werner Rall
Publication Date: January 25, 2023
Content excerpt:
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Vulnerability Reporting with Power BI - involves implementing a cloud-based reporting and visualization solution that brings exposure to active threats into sharp focus. It is intended to provide value to IT Leaders, Stakeholders, Security & Compliance teams, and Operations Teams that are responsible for mitigating CVE documented risks. The reports provide rich drill throughs that enable full understanding of an organization's current data and trends. The data is sourced from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint using API calls, stored in a small serverless Azure SQL instance, and can be accessed from anywhere on any device.
Title: How To Automate The Hybrid World Part Two Of Two
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Jonas Ohmsen
Publication Date: January 26, 2023
Content excerpt:
Over the years Microsoft has developed more and more automation tools such as Power Automate, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions or Azure Automation. While Azure Automation is not the latest tool in the automation tools family, I dedicate this blog this amazing tool and hopefully provide you with an easy-to-follow how-to guide.
Title: Automating Cumbersome Tasks - Disk Snapshots!
Source: Core Infrastructure and Security
Author: Darren Turchiarelli
Publication Date: January 29, 2023
Content excerpt:
With cost optimization being at the forefront of many conversations, organizations as well as individuals are constantly seeking new ways to optimize their Azure environment from an operational lens, remove the attack surface area and subsequently their spend in an automated fashion. Azure Advisor is one offering where consumers can review recommendations based on cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and overall performance. There is a treasure trove of recommendations within each of these categories coupled with quick fixes, but some consumers want to take these recommendations a step further and leverage automation to do the heavy lifting for them.
Title: New Cluster-Wide Control For Virtual Machine Live Migrations In Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI
Source: Failover Clustering
Author: Steven Ekren
Publication Date: January 5, 2023
Content excerpt:
There is a new enhancement in the ability to manage the number of parallel live migrations within a cluster, making it easier to change and ensuring consistency. Previously, changing it required setting it on each node of the cluster, and remembering to set it when a new server is added to the cluster. This meant it was easy to have inconsistencies across the nodes.
Hyper-v has a setting to limit the number of live migrations that a server can participate in. If an administrator wanted to change this value to be optimized for their systems, they would have to go to each node of a failover cluster and change the per-server Hyper-V property. They would also have to remember to set this property for any new node added to the cluster. This meant that it was difficult to ensure consistency over time.
With the installation of the September 2022 Windows Update package or later, The new cluster property MaximumParallelMigrations was added that allows an administrator to set the value once and have each node of the cluster inherit the setting. When new servers are added to the cluster, the cluster value will be inherited. This ensures consistency and makes it easy to adjust the system.
Title: How to Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Cluster
Source: FastTrack for Azure
Author: Paolo Salvatori
Publication Date: January 2, 2023
Content excerpt:
This article contains a few recommendations for reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.
Title: AKS Review
Source: FastTrack for Azure
Author: Orestis Meikopoulos
Publication Date: January 4, 2023; January 10, 2023; January 16, 2023; January 24, 2023
Content excerpt:
- 1.1: Networking – Ingress/Egress
- 1.2: Networking – AKS Networking & Private Connectivity
- 2.1: Identity & Access Control – Cluster, Operator, & Pod Identity
- 3.1: Security - Prevention
Title: The Azure FinOps Guide
Source: FastTrack for Azure
Author: Dolev Shor
Publication Date: January 8, 2023
Content excerpt:
This article centralizes Azure FinOps (Financial Operations) information and tools to enabling a better understanding and optimization of cloud costs.
The main purposes of this guide is to help customers do more with less by:
- Identifying cost-saving opportunities
- Optimizing cloud efficiency
- Gaining a better understanding and control of cloud costs
Title: Take Your Azure CLI Skills To The Next Level
Source: FastTrack for Azure
Author: Nadav Ben Haim
Publication Date: January 24, 2023
Content excerpt:
We'll start by installing the Azure CLI command [or opening an Azure Cloud Shell].
Title: Azure VPN Gateway vs. ExpressRoute - Quick Comparison
Source: FastTrack for Azure
Author: laghim
Publication Date: January 26, 2023
Content excerpt:
Let's start by clearing the confusion around the terms Virtual Network Gateway, VPN Gateway, and ExpressRoute Gateway.
Title: Integrating Azure Front Door WAF with Azure Container Apps
Source: FastTrack for Azure
Author: Chris Bellee
Publication Date: February 1, 2023
Content excerpt:
Many customers require Web Applications & APIs to only be accessible via a private IP address with a Web Application Firewall on the internet edge, to protect from common exploits and vulnerabilities. Azure Front Door provides global routing and WAF capabilities to satisfy this requirement.
Title: New Microsoft Intune Troubleshooting Experience
Source: Intune Customer Success
Author: Intune Support Team
Publication Date: January 31, 2023
Content excerpt:
There’s a new troubleshooting experience in Microsoft Intune that provides quicker access to application, compliance, and policy data as well as deployment status. This new experience also includes several new features, including:
- Export, filter, and sort on reports.
- Support for excluded policies and applications.
- Filter the entire experience to a single device.
Title: How to Run a Windows 11 VM on Hyper-V
Source: ITOps Talk
Author: Vinicius Apolinario
Publication Date: January 12, 2023
Content excerpt:
Happy new year everyone! Last month, before the holidays I wanted to run a Windows 11 VM on Hyper-V to run a few tests on Windows containers in a different environment than my local machine. However, it took me some time to get that VM up and running, simply because I forgot about the new hardware requirements for Windows 11 and that I had to get them configured before I installed the new OS in it. This blog post is my contribution so you don’t have to go through the same!
Title: How To Use Get-Credential with Windows Containers
Source: ITOps Talk
Author: Vinicius Apolinario
Publication Date: January 23, 2023
Content excerpt:
The idea on this blog post came from an issue opened by an user on the Windows Containers GitHub Repo. I thought the problem faced by the user should be common enough that others might be interested in a solution.
Title: What's New in Azure Networking – January 2023 edition
Source: ITOps Talk
Author: Pierre Roman
Publication Date: January 24, 2023
Content excerpt:
As @Michael mentioned last month Azure Networking is the foundation of your infrastructure in Azure. So, we’re happy to bring you a monthly update on What’s new in Azure Networking.
In this blog post, we’ll cover what new with Azure Networking.
Title: Azure Policies for Automating Azure Governance - Choosing Policies - Microsoft Community Hub
Source: ITOps Talk
Author: Amy Colyer
Publication Date: January 26, 2023
Content excerpt:
Time and time again, many people get that go ahead for cloud but don't want to unleash everyone into the environment. This is with good understanding. Without policies and governance in place, cloud spend can go unmonitored or resources deployed not following your company's standards. Getting a good standard in place with Azure Policy can make sure you and your team keep an organized Azure environment in the short term and long term as the footprint grows. Security should always be first of mind as well.
Title: The Parent Tag: cm-resource-parent for Azure Cost Management
Source: ITOps Talk
Author: Sonia Cuff
Publication Date: January 31, 2023
Content excerpt:
The parent tag is a new way to group related Microsoft Azure resources in Microsoft Cost Management + Billing. But wait, can’t you already combine resource costs by giving them the same tag name and value, like Application: Purchasing? Yes, you can, kind of … so let’s take a look at the difference.
Before I dive into HOW to add this tag to your Microsoft Azure resources, let me show you WHY you want to do this.
Title: IPv6 Coming to Azure AD
Source: Microsoft Entra (Azure AD)
Author: Shobhit Sahay
Publication Date: January 10, 2023
Content excerpt:
With the growing adoption and support of IPv6 across enterprise networks, service providers, and devices, many customers are wondering if their users can continue to access their services and applications from IPv6 clients and IPv6 networks.
Today, we’re excited to announce our plan to bring IPv6 support to Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). This will allow customers to reach the Azure AD services over IPv4, IPv6 or dual stack endpoints.
Title: Combatting Risky Sign-ins in Azure Active Directory
Source: Microsoft Entra (Azure AD)
Author: Timur Engin
Publication Date: January 30, 2023
Content excerpt:
It is almost inevitable your organization will be targeted with malicious sign in attempts to cloud apps. It is often the case an employee uses the same password for their work account as they do for their personal accounts. Password leaks from organizations other than yours pose a threat if your employees are using the same password for the same apps, even if their email/UPN is different. As more apps are moving to the cloud it becomes increasingly more imperative that these malicious sign in attempts don’t go unnoticed and correct action is taken against them. You can check here for Azure identity and access best practices.
Title: Seamless Application Access and Lifecycle Management for Multi-tenant Azure AD Organizations
Source: Microsoft Entra (Azure AD)
Author: Joseph Dadzie
Publication Date: January 31, 2023
Content excerpt:
Today I'm thrilled to announce that cross-tenant synchronization is in public preview!
Your organization may have recently acquired a new company, merged with another company, or restructured based on newly formed business units. As your organization evolves, your IT team adapts to meet the changing needs. This often includes integrating with an existing Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant or forming a new one. Regardless of how your identity infrastructure is managed, we know how critical it is that end users have a seamless experience accessing resources and collaborating across tenants. Cross-tenant synchronization enables organizations to provide seamless access and collaboration experiences in your multi-tenant environment.
Title: What's New in Microsoft Intune - 2301 (January) Edition
Source: Microsoft Intune
Author: Ramya Chitrakar
Publication Date: January 26, 2023
Content excerpt:
Welcome to our first What's New of calendar year 2023! The January (2301) Microsoft Intune service release is here and this month we're providing many new or improved application management capabilities. We're releasing macOS software update policy management for supervised devices, introducing public preview of Microsoft Tunnel for Mobile Application Management (MAM) on iOS, and improving the app supersedence and tracking experience for win32 apps.
Title: Don’t miss out on this year’s top resources for skilling up on Azure
Source: Microsoft Learn
Author: Deepa Athre
Publication Date: January 19, 2023
Content excerpt:
It’s been a big quarter for Azure learners. We’ve added dozens of opportunities aimed at helping you gain skills to confront the uncertainty in today’s market. No matter if you’re new to the IT field or more experienced, we’re here to support you in your learning journey. Discover how to take your Azure knowledge to new heights as we look back on the recently published learning resources that have been helping learners reach their goals.
Title: Skilling up on Microsoft Security, compliance, and identity: Quarterly recap
Source: Microsoft Learn
Author: Shirleyse Haley
Publication Date: January 26, 2023
Content excerpt:
Happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2023 with a Cloud Skills Challenge to help security professionals build skills in Information Protection Administration. If you complete this challenge in 30 days or less, you could be eligible for 50% off a Microsoft Certification exam.
Source: Networking
Author: Kyle Bisnett, Anirban Paul, vivlapp, Lily Wu
Publication Date: January 17, 2023
Content excerpt:
Today is an exciting day as we share with each of you the extensive new features and improvements for SDN in Windows Admin Center 2211 (WAC)! We cannot thank you enough for the fantastic feedback and requests to help us as a team drive forward. In case you missed it, Windows Admin Center (WAC) 2211 officially announced General Availability in December. You can download it here today!
Title: Deploying 100s of Production Clusters in minutes!
Source: Networking
Author: Param Mahajan
Publication Date: January 30, 2023
Content excerpt:
You're an Azure Stack HCI Administrator and you've worked tirelessly to test your clusters and get them ready for production; you've filled out the necessary paperwork, you've gotten sign-off from all the stakeholders; and now it's time to implement your configuration in production. Your boss gives you a short window to deploy your new clusters and you need to make sure that what you tested - your reference cluster - represents the configuration you're sending to your production clusters. Oh yeah, and you have 100's of clusters that need this configuration complete with custom VLANs, MTU sizes, and all the other environmental changes you made to ensure it works in your environment.
Title: Support ends for Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, 8.1
Source: Storage at Microsoft
Author: Ned Pyle
Publication Date: January 10, 2023
Content excerpt:
Heya folks, Ned here again. January 10 is a big day for support lifecycle on Windows Server and Windows. Not directly storage or file services-related, but critical news for IT Pros and their organizations, so I'm blogging about it.
Title: Skilling snack: Windows security fundamentals
Source: Windows IT Pro
Author: Harjit Dhaliwal
Publication Date: January 26, 2023
Content excerpt:
Hungry for some Windows security fundamentals? With so many resources on security, where should you start? Get up to speed and on your way in less than two hours. Learn about securing endpoints, identity, and data, including essential concepts and tools. And just like that, watch how the core half of your chip-to-cloud environment (3/6 layers of security) is approaching Zero Trust.
Title: Windows skilling snacks: bite-sized learning for IT pros
Source: Windows IT Pro
Author: Harjit Dhaliwal
Publication Date: January 26, 2023
Content excerpt:
Want to improve your Windows security, deployment, and management skills? Whether you’re new to IT or a seasoned vet, skilling snacks make it easy for you to study up on the latest features, tools, or recommended approaches. There is a sea of technical information out there. Here’s a new way to dive in without getting overwhelmed.
Title: Azure Host OS - Cloud Host
Source: Windows OS Platform
Author: Hari Pulapaka
Publication Date: January 6, 2023
Content excerpt:
Windows is a versatile and flexible operating system, running on a variety of machine architectures and available in multiple SKUs. It currently supports x86, x64, and ARM architectures. It even used to support Itanium, PowerPC, Alpha, and MIPS (wiki entry). Windows also runs in a multitude of environments; from data centers, laptops, and phones to embedded devices such as ATM machines.
Even with all of this support, the core of Windows remains virtually unchanged on all these architectures and SKUs. Windows dynamically scales up, depending on the architecture and the processor that it’s run on to exploit the full power of the hardware. This same applies to Microsoft Azure as well. So, if you have ever wondered how Windows runs Azure nodes in the data center, read ahead!
Previous CTO! Guides:
Additional resources:
- Azure documentation
- Azure pricing calculator (VERY handy!)
- Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework
- Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework
- Windows Server documentation
- Windows client documentation for IT Pros
- PowerShell documentation
- Core Infrastructure and Security blog
- Microsoft Tech Community blogs
- Microsoft technical documentation (Microsoft Docs)
- Sysinternals blog
- Microsoft Learn
- Microsoft Support (Knowledge Base)
- Microsoft Archived Content (MSDN/TechNet blogs, MSDN Magazine, MSDN Newsletter, TechNet Newsletter)