Creating a real-time IT dashboard is essential for IT professionals for managing their environments and to be proactive. A Few months ago, a great tool called ‘PowerShell Universal Dashboard’ or ‘PoshUD’ was officially released. In this article, Nicolas Prigent describes PoshUD, and how to use it to monitor your infrastructure using PowerShell.… Read more
The ability to quickly spin up a virtual machine is one of the great things about Azure. In this article, Robert Cain describes the steps to set up a VM using PowerShell using his PSAzure module. … Read more
Docker continues to make improvements in their products running on Windows. In this article, Nicolas Prigent explains how to share data between Windows containers and the container host. As a bonus, he also shows how to run a Linux container on Windows Server 2016.… Read more
Azure virtual machines are created for many reasons, even just to have an environment to quickly test something out. In this article, Robert Cain demonstrates the first few steps in automating the process with PowerShell. He shows how to gather information needed and set up a resource group, storage and networking needed for the VM. … Read more
With SQL Server 2017, Microsoft announced the exciting news that SQL Server would now run in Docker containers. Laerte Junior provides a guide to get started creating SQL Server instances in Docker.… Read more
One of the most important tools for query tuning is the ability to view execution plans. They are even portable; you can send an execution plan to get advice from someone who doesn't have access to the underlying data. Have you even considered that sensitive information might travel along with the plans? Hugo Kornelis explains how execution plans affect data protection. … Read more
A myriad of laws regulate data retention and generally compete with each other. William Brewer provides an introduction to the principles, but gives good advice -- leave the details to the specialists. … Read more
News reports about data breaches are common occurrences. Even the companies that exist to keep our data safe are not immune. William Brewer answers the question about data breaches that you may be too shy to ask. … Read more
A company’s data is one of its most valuable and important resources. Managing and protecting that data are big responsibilities, and a data governance processes must be put into place to avoid misuse and to meet regulations. In this article, William Brewer answers questions you may have about data governance but were too shy to ask.… Read more
IT shops do not want to spend time and energy managing infrastructure and servers as was done in the past. They must conserve resources for the things that add value for the business. Today, it is challenging for companies to automate and configure their Azure infrastructure. In the first part of his new series, Nicolas Prigent introduces the basics about Azure and Windows PowerShell for DevOps and Sysadmin.… Read more
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be in effect in May of 2018. Data masking is one technique that can help your organization comply with this and other regulations. William Brewer answers those questions about data masking that you were too shy to ask.… Read more
The key to efficient development is reusability. When developing scripts for administration, being able to restart a script where it left off is also important. Robert Cain shows you how to write functions in PowerShell that have these two qualities for administering Azure.… Read more
A microservice architecture can provide great benefits to certain types of applications that have pronounced troughs and peaks in demand, such as web-based shopping apps. With containerization, there is the promise of deploying containerized services in a matter of seconds to deal with demand. Has the Docker ecosystem now reached the level of maturity to allow this type of application to become standard practice?… Read more
With the latest release of Hyper-V, Microsoft has made some great improvements to their Hypervisor. For many reasons, Hyper-V has become a major player in virtualization. In this article, Nicolas Prigent describes new Hyper-V updates and enhanced Hyper-V features that were introduced with Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.… Read more
Microsoft has introduced an installation option of Windows Server 2016 that provides an operating system designed and optimized for Cloud operations. Microsoft's Nano Server is intended to support and run born-in-the-cloud applications and containers. In this article, Nicolas Prigent explains how to easily and quickly deploy Nano Servers in your server environment, using either PowerShell or a GUI.… Read more
Cloud-based services and applications must still be monitored just like the on-premise ones. You still need most of your data center activities that ensure that your planning, budgeting, security and service-level obligations are met wherever the data and services are actually hosted. There is much to be said for an integrated approach to providing a unified view of entire application workloads on-premise. hybrid and cloud using the same tools wherever possible. … Read more
PowerShell is a scripting language, and like all scripting languages it struggles to perform well with rapid iterative processes such as aggregation. It isn't well-known that PowerShell can use LINQ for many of those tasks which would otherwise use iteration, though somewhat awkwardly. However, some of the speed improvements you can get are startling. To get you well started, Michael explains every LINQ function , gives you example code in C#, The PowerShell way of getting the result, and finally Powershell's use of LINQ. This article could change the way you use PowerShell.… Read more
So far, in this series, Nicolas has shown how to get simple container instances up and running with just some basic background information. Now we need to understand the differences between Linux containers, Windows Server containers and Hyper-V containers. We can then define, create and run multi-container Docker applications, and port existing Windows Container VMs to Docker.… Read more
Deployments can be made easier, in many different ways, by using Docker and Windows Containers; but how do you set about working with them? As part of his practical series on Windows Containers and Docker, Nicolas shows how to deploy a Container Host to the Microsoft Azure cloud. retrieve Images from Docker Hub, build your own container image, and push your images to the Docker Hub. … Read more
Because PowerShell needs to be usable as an immediate scripting language by IT professionals who type in commands at a console, there have to be language devices such as aliases that can make for terseness when appropriate. There are several ways of cutting down the verbiage in a script, and being able to specify default values via $PSDefaultParameterValues is one of the more generally useful ones. Michael Sorens explains how it can save you time in your daily work.… Read more
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