Posts by Adam Bertram

With total enterprise data volumes projected to exceed 2.02 petabytes by 2022, smart safeguards must be implemented to keep it protected. Those strategies themselves are changing in lockstep industry trends. Now that hybrid and full-cloud deployments are dominant, multiple external variables can impact how data is stored and preserved. Additionally, over one quarter of Cloud Vision 2020’s survey respondents could shift 95% of critical workloads cloudward by 2025. Read more

Cloud deployments are continuing to gain massive popularity, accelerated by the desire to modernize, evolving telework trends, and cost concerns. While not an exhaustive list of reasons, cloud platforms are here to stay. Eighty-one percent of surveyed organizations leveraged multi-cloud strategies last year. Additionally, Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud Survey found that 93% of respondents plan to implement multi-cloud. That said, what’s all the buzz about? We’ll dive into the ins and outs of multi-cloud, how you can implement it, and its inherent benefits. Read more

If you’re operating in a Windows or Windows Server environment, and have critical data to protect, then Windows Storage Spaces can come in handy. Many data centers and server farms implement both HDDs and SSDs for storing important data. Unfortunately, 10% of hard drives fail past the three-year mark. Organizations must recognize this threat — and the numerous other hardware, software and human snafus that may threaten data integrity. Read more

Installing Remote Desktop Services (RDS) on Windows Server 2019 appears to take many steps, but in reality is quite easy. In this article, we dive into how to install these services in a domain environment that requires two servers. Read more

Microsoft originally offered the Microsoft Network Monitor which was subsequently succeeded by the Microsoft Message Analyzer application. Unfortunately, Microsoft has discontinued the Microsoft Message Analyzer and removed its download links. Therefore, only the older Microsoft Network Monitor is available. In this article, we are going to see how to capture and inspect packets using the latest available version of Microsoft Network Monitor. Read more

Any Microsoft SQL database administrator (DBA) will need to patch a SQL installation at one time or another. Using PowerShell, this can be made far easier and more convenient, especially with large numbers of servers. In this article, we are going to build a simple script for patching SQL Servers with Service Packs. Read more

In this tutorial, you will take a hands-on approach to resize a virtual machine in Azure with PowerShell. You will write code to mitigate the need to navigate to the Azure Portal and instead, manage the virtual machine with code from a text editor. Read more

In this article, we will explore using PowerShell to create and modify an Azure DNS zone. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to work with Azure DNS zones (public and private) and various records therein. Read more

Microsoft Sysinternals PSExec is an essential tool for any IT administrator. Able to remotely execute commands, install software, launch applications, and run as the system account, PSExec makes short work of common administrative tasks.

As you will find out in this article, there are many different use cases, of which we barely scratch the surface. With that in mind, let’s jump into some common PSExec commands and scenarios below!

Read more

A great way to improve your PowerShell module-building workflow is to use a Git repository hosted on GitHub. Using a Github repo for your PowerShell module comes with many benefits. These benefits include being able to roll back to previous versions and creating multiple branches to be able to test different changes while maintaining the existing working module among others.

In this article, you will learn how to create a GitHub repository for an existing PowerShell module to make development much more efficient.

Read more