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Two of the biggest techniques for saving money on Azure Virtual Machines are Reservations and shutting down VMs when they are not in use. However, as they can’t be used together which one is best? Azure Reservations allow you to rent those VMs for a much cheaper price, but there’s a commitment of 1 or 3 years. One …
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During a recent consolidation prospect I was faced with the challenge of migrated encrypted VMs from one vCenter to another. For the non-encrypted VMs this is not a problem- the excellent Cross vCenter vMotion tool worked very well live migrating from vSphere 6.0/6.7 environments to the new 6.7 this is now built in to …
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A guide to quickly setup an Azure function to draw chemical structures from SMILES strings. This uses the docker image provided by the CDK project to generate image files of a molecular structure based on a SMILES string. Not only is this potentially useful as a component in a larger application, but it also …
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A surprise one from your friendly neighbourhood IT Support this afternoon. A laptop running Windows 10 has started playing back all the sound picked up by the Microphone- my voice was being echoed back (with a slight delay) even when no applications were running. The solution here is found in a setting in the Windows …
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If you take a Microsoft Azure course you may be given a limited-time Azure Subscription to help your learning. This post shows how to check the usage of that allowance so you can make the most of it before having to revert to your personal paid-for account. The Azure Sponsorships portal Sign into …
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This week VMware announced that VMware Tools – the agent that sits on the guest operating system is now a separate product. This means that it’s subject to its own product lifecycle, and admins can modify their approach to keeping tools updated. It’s all grown up, and got a home of it’s own. Traditionally VMtools have …
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By joining PowerCLI to interrogate a VMware vSphere environment and the Webhook API to post Microsoft Teams messages, we can send informational reports on the state of a virtual environment to channels in Teams. In this example I have a weekly report on the number of hosts and VMs in an environment. This is fairly …
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As a benefit for attending the online (and free!) Ignite conference this year, Microsoft have rewarded delegates with some discount prices on “select digital downloadable products” at the company store. Amongst the X-box games there’s also a great deal on the Office Family subscription. I’m already a user of “Microsoft …
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Troubleshooting a vMotion error. Symptoms Trying to vMotion (in my case a cross-vCenter vMotion from a 6.5 system to 6.7) a VM the error “The input arguments had entities that did not belong to the same datacenter.” occurred. Other VMs were migrating fine. Cause The CD Drive in the source VM was mapped to (although not …
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