The vSphere 8 release includes many new features that are exposed in the new vCenter Server 8 and ESXi 8 releases. With the release of vSphere 8, many organizations will look at upgrading to the latest VMware vSphere.

The post New features in VMware vSphere 8 first appeared on 4sysops.

If you to want to upload an on-premises Hyper-V VM to the cloud to create a custom Azure image containing all your business applications in a preconfigured state, this post will help you.

The post Create a custom Azure image first appeared on 4sysops.

The new FSLogix version, which was released in October, introduces a long-awaited feature: VHDX compaction. FSLogix is a standalone product acquired in late 2017 by Microsoft for profile management and application masking features. It is primarily used in virtual desktop or RDSH solutions to provide users with a persistent experience in nonpersistent environments.

The post FSLogix VHDX compaction: Resize virtual disks first appeared on 4sysops.

It is common for organizations to host websites and other resources that may be accessible from external and internal clients on the LAN. Traditionally, organizations may have maintained two different DNS servers for this reason. Microsoft's split-brain DNS deployment using DNS policy helps consolidate these resources using Active Directory-integrated zones.

The post Split-brain DNS deployment using Windows Server DNS policy first appeared on 4sysops.

Many websites ask users whether they want to receive notifications. In managed environments, this feature can be disabled via group policies. Both Chromium-based browsers and Firefox allow whitelisting and blacklisting of such websites.

The post Block notifications in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox first appeared on 4sysops.

This step-by-step guide explains how to install the unified CloudWatch agent on Windows on EC2 Windows instances. This allows you to monitor logs and guest OS metrics. In the example here, I will show you how we can monitor IIS with CloudWatch.

The post Install the unified CloudWatch agent on Windows EC2 instances first appeared on 4sysops.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS, which builds on the now deprecated SSL protocol) allow you to encrypt Microsoft SQL Server network communication, which is essential for your security. In this post, you'll learn how to enable TLS on your SQL Server.

The post Enable TLS on SQL Server first appeared on 4sysops.

You may be familiar with the Conditional Access policy feature in Azure AD as a means to control access to your tenant. In addition to granting or blocking access to the tenant as a whole, it is possible to restrict certain user actions. One important action you should consider controlling is from where a user can enroll in multifactor authentication (MFA).

The post Restricting registration to Azure AD MFA from trusted locations with Conditional Access policy first appeared on 4sysops.

The two most common protocols for monitoring Microsoft products are Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). They are both natively supported in Windows and Windows Server, and neither one requires you to install third-party add-ons to start monitoring. This article explains the difference between the two protocols and helps you choose the one that works better for your scenario.

The post SNMP vs WMI for Windows monitoring first appeared on 4sysops.

Microsoft will enable the new number matching feature by default in February 2023. Number matching for Azure AD MFA is almost the reverse of the multi-factor authentication you know. With number matching, a number is displayed to a user when they sign in, and instead of entering this number on the device, they log in to confirm the number on the MFA device. Temporary Access Pass is another feature that allows you to help end users who are unable to meet sign-in criteria.

The post Azure AD MFA with number matching and temporary access passes first appeared on 4sysops.

VMware recently announced the licensing terms, editions, and pricing of vSphere 8. All components, including ESXi, vCenter, and vSAN, are still available via perpetual licenses. However, the vendor announced a switch to subscriptions, which will be made more attractive through a subscription upgrade program.

The post VMware vSphere 8: Editions, licensing, and pricing first appeared on 4sysops.

You can use PowerShell to find and remove duplicate files that are only wasting valuable storage. Once you identify duplicate files, you can move them to another location, or you might even want to permanently remove all duplicates.

The post Find and remove duplicate files with PowerShell first appeared on 4sysops.

With the procedure described in this post, you can ensure that only devices with an assigned Microsoft 365 compliance policy are able to sign in. This way, you will significantly improve the security of your Microsoft 365 deployment.

The post Microsoft 365 compliance policy: Control access with compliant devices first appeared on 4sysops.

If you need to download files regularly from an FTP server, Windows offers two onboard tools to automate this process. These are ftp.exe and curl, which was added just recently. For the latter, you only need one command; for FTP, you can use whole scripts.

The post Automate file downloads with Windows FTP or curl first appeared on 4sysops.

Are backups required for Microsoft 365? We look at the reasons you should back up your Microsoft 365 data and the new Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 features to protect your M365 data.

The post Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365—Why you need to back up your M365 data first appeared on 4sysops.

PsInfo, a command-line tool that is part of the Sysinternals suite, gets key information about Windows systems, such as the type of installation, available disk space, installed applications, kernel build number, uptime, registered owner, and the number of processors.

The post PsInfo: Get disk space, installed applications, and other information about local and remote Windows systems first appeared on 4sysops.

Amazon provides three ways you can access and manage Amazon Web Services: AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and software development kits (SDKs). Our focus here will be on the software development kit using the Go programming language. We will look at what the SDK actually is and how to get up and running with installation and AWS account access. As an example, we will use the Go AWS SDK to create an S3 bucket.

The post A Go AWS SDK example first appeared on 4sysops.

Changing passwords regularly is no longer recommended, and the Security Baseline for Windows doesn't include a corresponding setting. Nevertheless, in certain situations, it can be important to know how old the user's passwords are. You can easily find this out with PowerShell.

The post When did users last change their password in Active Directory? first appeared on 4sysops.

The automatic variable PSBoundParameters stores the parameters that you explicitly passed to a function in a hash table. With the help of splatting, you can use this PowerShell feature to simplify passing of parameters to functions.

The post Use PowerShell splatting and PSBoundParameters to pass parameters first appeared on 4sysops.