Securing Local Administrator Passwords

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, maintaining a robust security posture is imperative for businesses and organizations of all sizes. One essential aspect of this security posture is effective password management, which can often be overlooked.

Read more: Securing Local Administrator Passwords

A question I ask my customers quite often scares me with the response.

Me: How are you managing the local administrator passwords within your environment?

Response::

  • Option 1: We use a consistent local admin password across all of our servers for easy access.
    – Option 1a: We use a consistent local admin password and keep that in a password vault.
  • Option 2: We use a unique password, but it’s different and difficult to keep track of across the deployments.
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By Mike Dent, ago

Mastering Maintenance Mode Operations in Nutanix: A Guide for AHV and ESXi

As with years past, as we come to a close on year’s end, I take some time to clean up the As-Built documentation templates I maintain for deployments; as part of this activity, I always come across outdated sections based on current feature sets, or areas that I think can use some additional content.

This week, I noticed that my documentation about placing hosts into maintenance mode with Nutanix, whether running AHV or ESXi, is a bit outdated and could use some touching up.

Coming out of that, I thought it might be nice to discuss your different maintenance mode operations available with Nutanix and be a little hypervisor-specific for the options available.

I’ll write a 3-part series discussing the different scenarios for maintenance mode and detail the process and some known issues and/or limitations across the different hypervisors.

Today’s post will focus on maintenance mode and why it’s important. It will also cover maintenance mode operations with the Nutanix native hypervisor, AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor).

  • Part 2 will cover ESXi.
  • Part 3 will cover upgrading ESXi thru Prism.

The series will focus on AOS 6.5+, which is, at the time of this writing (12/23/23), the latest LTS release from Nutanix.

For this blog series, I’ll use a 4-node NX-1065 cluster imaged with the specific hypervisor for that post. For the ESXi post, I will use a pre-existing vCenter instance for cluster management.

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By Mike Dent, ago

Zerto v10 – Update 2 – Excitement Continues!

Zerto just dropped Update 2 for version 10, and they continue to really drive some great features into the product, extending what started with v10 as some game-changing features. See my past post on this one.

Starting with v10, Zerto made the ZVM role only available on a Linux appliance, even though it was available starting with 9.5 and 9.7 – but you had options for both Windows or Linux roles for the ZVM. With the v10 release, the Windows ZVM role is fully deprecated and Zerto no longer releases software for v10 on Windows.

So with v10, we get a much more secure approach and can eliminate the Windows server requirements, but with that comes a big double-check before moving onto v10. With v10 AND the Linux ZVM role, this also means that Zerto has made some changes on the licensing front, which needs to be taken care of prior to upgrading to v10 OR standing up the Linux ZVM role.

So now that we have the licensing gotchas out of the way, let’s talk a bit more about what’s come with Update 1 and 2 and some other areas of Zerto to be aware of.

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By Mike Dent, ago

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