Microsoft provides evaluation version of Windows Server 2019 on their website. These are intended to allow users to deploy a temporary server for testing or checking out new features. It isn’t an easy feat to convert these into KMS servers. In a recent lab environment we used the Windows Server 2019 evaluation without understanding the difficulty in converting it to NFR once we received those licenses. We researched the problem and found a solution to convert a server created with an evaluation ISO to a KMS licensed lab VM.

Getting Started with Terraform on Windows 10 Terraform is a tool for defining and provisioning infrastructure as code (IaC). You can use Terraform to deploy a consistent infrastructure platform with predictable results every time. In this guide, you will install Terraform on your computer, and then you will create and destroy a Docker container. Prerequisites Computer with Windows 10 updated version 2004 Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2 (WSL2) Docker Desktop Install Terraform To install Terraform, visit Terraform.

The Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification (AZ-900) is an entry-level exam, introducing Azure to technical and non-technical people. The test covers a range of general cloud concepts and Microsoft products. This exam gives students a firm foundation to continue learning Microsoft Azure and to participate in the infrastructure shift from on-premises to the cloud. The Azure Fundamentals exam is about 35 questions with a 60-minute time limit. They are a mix of drop-down, drag and drop, and multiple-choice questions.

2020 will go down in history as the year that changed the world. A global pandemic forced everyone to stay indoors, employers were forced to embrace work-from-home, and companies that supported employees had to respond. One industry that responded quickly was certification. Pearson Vue had already allowed some certification to be taken at home, but now most major technology vendors got on board. This opens up a new world of opportunity and a degree of accessibility that benefits everyone in the IT industry.

On July 16, 2018, Uila released version 2.0 of its application monitoring and analytics platform. Previously we explored its application discovery and mapping features, focusing on resources that resided within an on-premises datacenter. As industry trends shift toward a hybrid cloud model many monitoring tools have a visibility gap. They only inspect data within their domains, creating a black hole between the on-premises datacenter and the cloud instances. Uila 2.0 seeks to fill that gap and provide real time visibility across any cloud.

VMworld is one of the most anticipated events of the year for many people in the tech world. Engineers and architects from all over the world come together to share, learn, and make new friends. I have been fortunate enough to attend both VMworld 2016 and 2017 and have learned many lessons about how to maximize my time. There are a few tips you’ll read over and over again. They are definitely worth repeating, though.

Uila is a platform that seeks to amplify visibility into a virtualized environment, allowing technicians to determine root cause for performance and availability issues. Increasing availability and determining root cause are critically important but are only one part of the Uila platform. The dashboard retains its familiar appearance, with its green/yellow/red application performance visualization but the software itself has many new features to explore. Ulia has spent significant time and effort enhancing other features, in particular application mapping and documentation.

There are many options for maintaining a website these days. There are free options on blogger and WordPress, all the way up to premium services. I hosted this site on Squarespace for many years. The service is good but their templates selection was lacking for a tech blog. I was also underwhelmed with their editor’s performance and it is fairly expensive. I set a goal to migrate my website onto another service to both reduce the cost to maintain and to make it a little easier to update if I am offline.

Maintaining valid licensing in vRealize Operations Manager is crucial to getting the most out of the tool. There are two methods of licensing vROps: per processor with unlimited VMs or per virtual machine or physical server monitored. The latter method is also referred to as an Operating System Instance, or OSI. An OSI is any device, physical or virtual, that has an IP address and is capable of being monitored. Powered Off VMs don’t count against your OSI count.

Designing for a Home Lab A practical way to gain experience with vRealize Operations Manager is to deploy and implement it into a home lab. A design for a home lab almost seems too simple, but planning it out and diagraming a simple example can help when the time comes to design a production environment. The environment will need to support the following: Monitor 100 Objects Monitor 10 End Point Operations Management agents The environment is also resource constrained, and the node can be no larger than a Small node size.