#090 - Azure Virtual Desktops with Ryan Grelck and Aaron Hagman

Welcome back, loyal Data Center Therapy listeners!  As summer gives way to fall, we’re dropping another fresh and topical episode onto the hot podcast grill for your informational delight (with a dash of fun thrown in for good measure.)  Your host, Mr. Matt “My Stack Overflowed” Cozzolino joins IVOXY End User Compute specialists Ryan "Universal Broker" Grelck and Aaron "Auto-Scaling" Hagman for a deep dive into the new and cloud-enabled world that is Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, and Windows 365.   In just thirty-two minutes, you, our listeners will get to learn about:

• What Azure Virtual Desktop is, why it exists, and what the implications are for mobility and security.
• What kinds of capabilities AVD has for integration with VNETs, storage, profiles, domains and Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory.)
• Why some organizations use multi-session desktops.
• How Windows 365 differs from AVD, and how it’s two flavors (Business and Enterprise) differ from each other.
• What MSIX App Attach is, how it’s similar to Horizon’s AppVolumes, and how Horizon on Azure is now a thing.
• What the future of Windows Software Update Services is, how Intune and Group Policy interact, and what ADMX/ADML templates are.
• And many of the reasons businesses ultimately choose to implement AVD, including a focus on budget, CAPEX/OPEX, security or performance considerations.

Along the way the crew also discusses Azure Arc, VPN tunnels and Express Routes, GPU-enabled cloud desktop instances, Windows Update for Business, thin clients and much more.

If you like what you hear, please be sure to like, subscribe and share wherever you find quality podcasts like Data Center Therapy.  If you’re interested in learning more about AVD or Windows 365, please reach out to your IVOXY Account Manager and we’d be happy to help guide you on your journey.  Thanks for listening!  Be safe, be informed, manage your virtual desktop environment like a boss, and catch you on the next fresh episode!

Welcome back to another exciting episode of Data Center Therapy, where the digital device management seas are stormy but the DCT deck crew are always ready for a challenge!  While Matt ‘Hard to Starboard’ Cozzolino is out on PTO this week, your reliable and experienced Captain, Mr. Matt ‘Engines Steady at Quarter Impulse’ Yette welcomes IVOXY End User Computing Consultants Mr. Ryan ‘Magnum VDI’ Grelck and Mr. Aaron ‘Active Directory Animal’ Hagman to the virtual DCT studios, for a chat about all things Microsoft Intune.  

  In this episode, you, our adventurous listeners, will get to hear about:

• What Microsoft 365 traditionally encompasses and how offerings beyond M365 integrate into the usual core technologies (Exchange, Sharepoint, OneDrive and Teams).
• How Microsoft Intune can be helpful for hybrid work and remote/travelling sales teams, and how SCCM relates.
• Mobile Device Management, including some old stories of MobileIron, and what Intune is capable of doing for the new corporate end user’s experience and data management (including conditional access).
• How Azure Active Directory (now Entra) can integrate with on-premises infrastructure and clients and what happens when the Internet goes out.

  After listening, if you’re excited to join the September 19th through 21st Intune class (with Office Hours on September 22nd) then please be sure to reach out to your IVOXY Account Manager or podcasts@ivoxy.com so you can register yourself.  If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever quality podcasts like DCT are found.

  Thanks as always for listening, and stay safe, get your (Windows) Autopilot on, stay (mobile) managed and catch you on the next fun and informative episode of Data Center Therapy!  

Welcome back to another installment of your favorite IT podcast with a healthy dose of empathy, Data Center Therapy.  On this episode Matt ‘Mouse Master’ Yette and Matt ‘4K before 4K was cool’ Cozzolino invite VDI expert and all-around VMware guru Mr. Ryan Grelck back to the virtual studios.  Ryan shares the latest and greatest developments of end-user-computing and virtualization technologies, the changes that were made in the IVOXY training labs as of late, and even ends up getting mired in debates over the best input systems for end-user devices.

In this episode, you, the lifeblood of our show - our listeners, will get to learn about:

• Which software offerings make sense to deliver over application virtualization technologies.
• New evolutions of App Volumes including the intriguing and flexible Apps On Demand feature.
• Why imaging suites in medical systems tend not to be delivered over thin clients.

Ryan’s latest Summer 2023 Horizon class is coming up July 10th through the 14th, so if you’re interested in attending, please reach out to your IVOXY Account Manager or hit up the IVOXY website at your earliest convenience.  If you enjoyed what you heard, please be sure to like, share and subscribe to this podcast wherever you found it.  

Now that the dog days of summer are upon us, be sure to stay cool, stay informed, stay trained up, and catch you on the next episode of Data Center Therapy.  Thanks for listening!

You’re a one-person wrecking crew.

You rock your compute infrastructure, your hypervisor and virtual machine management system, and your storage subsystems, but you’ll admit, you could use some help with the networking side every once in a while.  In fact, every now and again, something happens on the network and you never can quite get to the root of it; you rebooted a device and that ended up fixing it ninety nine times out of a hundred.  Let’s not talk about that one-hundredth time - that was a doozy and turned out to be an obscure setting, or a malfunctioning printer or client system.  Either way, it sure would be nice to know, for certain, if you could make things better, permanently.

Or…

Maybe you’re at a large organization; perhaps even in the networking and security arm of an I.T. group, but somebody new starts and as you look over the documentation, you realize it’s terribly out of date.  It would be a great exercise to map everything out and update the records and create diagrams in addition to mentoring the new person, but there’s just not enough hours in the day to do both.  Or…is there a way you could?

Welcome back to another episode of your favorite I.T. podcast with a healthy dose of empathy, Data Center Therapy.  Your hosts, as always, include the gregarious and well-travelled Mr. Matt “Traffic Shaping the T1 with Napster” Yette as well as the multi-talented and tenured Mr. Matt “Hospitals don’t have change control windows!” Cozzolino.  In this edition, the Matts welcome IVOXY Director of Consulting and O.G. of the Networking Practice, Mr. Mack “Channel Surfing” Nethkin as well as the newest IVOXY Senior Network Consultant, Mr. Robert “Pain is just Weakness leaving the Network” Clack.

If terms like STP, HSRP, VRRP, BGP, OSPF, and Dynamic Routing get your motor running, great.  If it’s all Greek to you, that’s A-OK - in fact, you’ll likely pick up a few new network terms while giving this one a listen.

When listening to this latest episode, you, our grateful listeners will hear tales of:

• Mack’s experiences at Alaska Airlines and how those experiences shaped the practices he advocates for (including good switch names) and things he looks for when delivering network assessments for customers.
• The various sections of a typical network assessment, and what are included in those sections (including infrastructure, availability, management, performance and security elements, all to paint a more complete picture!)
• How network assessments are performed (and yes, there are diagrams!), the red/yellow/green light methodologies, but also more importantly, the why of the assessment - and why those reasons matter to businesses.

Please be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever you found this podcast and stay tuned to our show to learn about our upcoming training courses, including a second round of Matt Cozzolino’s Advanced vSphere 8 class.  Catch you on the next jam-packed episode of Data Center Therapy - and stay safe, assess your stacks or get some help assessing them, and as always, stay informed, DCT friends!

You!  Yes, you!  Running vSphere 6.5 or 6.7?  We understand, you’re busy! 

For many, many reasons, you couldn’t get around to upgrading your systems to 7.0 when VMware deprecated support for 6.7 and 6.5 on October 15th, 2022.  

So now you’re at a cross roads.  vSphere 8 is out, but fairly new, and comes with its own set of new hardware requirements.  Assuming your existing hardware meets them, do you upgrade to vSphere 7 or vSphere 8?  If instead you get new hosts, should you run ESXi 7 or 8 on them?  And what if you’re already running vSphere 7?  Should you upgrade to 8?

It’s a been a little while, but your favorite, most empathetic, most wise and most entertaining IT therapists are back in the office to look at all things vSphere 8.  In this episode of Data Center Therapy, your intrepid hosts Matt ‘Pi before Pi was cool’ Yette and Matt ‘Distributed Everything Si-fu’ Cozzolino teach you with their technology equivalents of the martial art of Wing Chun on what’s new with vSphere 8.  

In this episode, you, our treasured watchers (DCT is now on YouTube!) and our listeners, will get to learn about:

• How mature ESXi 7.0 is, when it came out, and how relatively rare PSODs are now
• What some of the implications of the new hardware requirements are for ESXi 8, and how boot media and types have changed since ESXi 7 appeared
• What new concepts and hardware support exists in ESXi 8, what Distributed Processing Units (DPUs) do and how AI/ML and hardware consumption models are managed inside vCenter
• What changes have taken place in the Lifecycle Manager of vCenter to make things easier to update and upgrade (both on the ESXi front, as well as the firmware of the systems ESXi is deployed on!)
• How regions and availability zone concepts, once solely in cloud hosting providers, has trickled down into the vSphere command-and-control paradigms as well as Tanzu’s current state of integration

As the Matts state in this episode, it’s not too late to join “Professor” Cozzolino in his Introduction to vSphere 8 class March 21st through 24th, and his Advanced vSphere 8 class April 18th through 21st.  If you need to know “how” to operate your systems, the Intro class is likely the best choice for you.  If you’d like to know the “why” of best practices in vSphere, then the Advanced class is the best choice for you.  To get registered ASAP, talk to your IVOXY Account Manager and we’ll be happy to assist right away.

As always, be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever you found this episode of Data Center Therapy.   If you need assistance planning or executing your own organization’s vSphere upgrades, please reach out to your IVOXY Account Manager.

In the meantime, stay up to date, stay supported, stay stable and optimized (as we like our ESXi hosts to be), and stay informed, DCT friends!  Talk to you on our next fresh episode!

The Matts are back, baby!

Your intrepid Data Center Therapy hosts, Mr. Matt ‘He sings the bass’ Yette, and Mr. Matt ‘He sings the tenor’ Cozzolino have returned!  The Matts welcome IVOXY’s own End-User Compute specialist Mr. Hoppy Shaw back to the DCT virtual studios.  Hoppy once again regales you, our audience, with stories of his time in Operations and the evolution of Microsoft products we’ve come to all know and (somewhat) love.  

Among the many topics they review are:

• The beginnings of ActiveSync and Exchange.
• The evolution of relevant software suites from Microsoft, including Systems Management Server, System Center Configuration Manager and Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager.
• How things like networks, infrastructure, and security must all be considered at the same time when integrating Azure cloud-based services into an Enterprise.
• The difference between Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktops.

Hoppy and the Matts also cover whether GPU-enabled virtual desktops are an option for folks thinking about Desktop-as-a-Service.  If your own organization needs help evolving its networks, infrastructure, or security practices so that you can leverage cost-effective virtual or cloud desktop infrastructure, please be sure to reach out to your IVOXY Account Manager so that we can help!  If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever you get your quality podcasts.  Thanks for listening as always and we hope to catch up with you on our next exciting episode.  Stay safe, stay secure, and stay well (endpoint) managed, DCT friends!  Ciao.

Scene: a dimly lit but warm lobby, looking a little like a doctor’s office in a log cabin but more comfortable.  You’re patiently waiting to hear from some I.T. podcast microphone jockeys who’ve haven’t peeked out of their door in some time.

You’ve been in that waiting room for a bit, but thankfully your Data Center Therapists, Mr. Matt “Email shields up” Yette and Mr. Matt “Attack vector identified” Cozzolino are back and ready to see you now!

As Yette says, if you could spend only a dollar on security, it should be spent on email security so give this episode a good listen to find out exactly why he says that.  You’ll likely end up agreeing.

Inside the virtual studios of DCT on this episode, our intrepid hosts welcome Darla Teeter, Global Solutions Architect from ProofPoint to talk about email security in a depth and breadth that you might not have thought possible.  Along the precarious, dangerous, do-not-click-here dark alleys of their email security discussion, the Matts and Darla discuss:

• What kinds of email, be it malicious or SPAM, can be filtered through email security solutions and how that filtering is accomplished
• What threats exist to businesses through email, and how social engineering and targeted campaigns are becoming more prevalent and attacking specific people in your organization
• How “browser isolation” can reduce or remove the threat of hackers leveraging “highly attacked people” for their privileges and access
• How machine learning, AI, threat analytics and rich data play a role in improving filtering solutions and security overall
• Why “default security” from a cloud provider may not be sufficient to protect an organization

In addition to the above, Darla also explains how ProofPoint goes way beyond the cliched and often boring, hour-long typical “security awareness trainings” when it comes to educating workers on email security.  The detection and remediation of knowledge gaps (via “mock attacks”) makes their solution a very interesting one.

Listen to this episode and you’ll find out how to win a Yeti cooler (no relating to our intrepid host, Mr. Matt Yette, of course) and be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever quality podcasts are found. 

As always, thanks for listening, stay warm this winter, practice safe email and stay informed with our next episode of Data Center Therapy!

Howdy Data Center Therapy regulars and new “Therapy Clients” alike!

On this episode, your hosts Matt “Release and Report” Yette and Matt “Reverse Lookup” Cozzolino break down email security for you, our listeners, with a little history, a little humor, and a little education around all those three, five and six letter acronyms.  The Matts share their deep technical knowledge and experiences so that you can understand what those acronyms add, protocol-wise, to enhancing the integrity of the email system as a whole. 

During the course of this podcast, you’ll get to hear about:

• The relationship of email to the ever growing threat of ransomware (“i.e. the malicious clicks”.)
• Technical protocols like DNSSEC, TXT, BIMI, DMARC, SPF and DKIM, and how those contribute to strengthening email security (while not breaking compatibility with the forty (40!)-year-old email protocol)
• How solutions like ProofPoint can easily add a strong layer of security to your own Office365 implementations

After you’ve listened to the episode, if you’re interested in the free IVOXY Email Integrity Assessment to check your own incoming and outgoing email security postures, please reach out to your local IVOXY representative, and if you don’t have one, hit us up at podcasts@ivoxy.com.  If you’re an Office365 customer, the Consultants assisting you will include a Rapid Risk Report as stated earlier.  

We hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, please be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever quality podcasts like DCT are found.  We appreciate it!

Guard that front door (of email activity!), stay safe, and stay as secure as you can, listeners.  Catch you on the next informative episode of Data Center Therapy!

Howdy Data Center Therapy listeners - are you all ready to go on a trip?  What if we told you this trip would take you back to the beginnings of Graphics Processing Units?

Are you ready to time-travel to the start of 3D-enabled gaming, the beginnings of fancy operating system user interfaces with visual effects, and the early artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts?

Strap on those headphones and press play to go on our GPU Journey, with your hosts Matt “3DFX” Yette and Matt “Literal Duct Tape” Cozzolino as they welcome IVOXY’s own Virtual Desktop and End User Computing Specialist Mr. Ryan Grelck back to the virtual Data Center Therapy studios.  The Matts and Ryan talk about:

• What GPUs actually do, what the early use cases for them were, and how they changed PCs and gaming, with a focus on the mid and late 90’s (while mentioning some blast-from-the-past games!)
• The current players in the GPU market, what kinds of applications GPUs can be used for, and the barriers of entry into the GPU business that keep choices limited.
• The fiscally unattractive elements of using GPUs in the Corporate and Enterprise space - licensing, and what may change soon with the entry of new GPU players.

If hearing the phrases “Quake”, “Counterstrike”, “Halo 3”, “Call of Duty” and “Destiny 2” pique your interest, you’ll no doubt enjoy this episode.  That said, even if you’re not a gamer, and you’re here to discern new developments in the GPU market, you’ll definitely want to tune into this one to learn more about Intel’s plans with “Arctic Sound M.”

As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever quality podcasts can be found.  If you’re looking for the documentary on “Unreal Tournament” Ryan mentioned, it may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKDvqLNk7CQ 

Stay low-latency, stay fragging, stay sharp and catch you on the next shiny episode, DCT friends!

Who doesn’t love a good trilogy?  

Cue the John Williams music!

Mr. Shane Bradley, IVOXY’s resident VMware Master, returns for his third appearance on Data Center Therapy.  Your intrepid hosts, Matt “No!  I want Performant, Scalable AND Value-Conscious!” Yette joins his co-host Matt “Have I shown you this Docker setup?” Cozzolino to collectively welcome Shane back to the DCT virtual studios, and talk about the new Advanced vSphere class he’s been working studiously on for the past few months.  Along the way, the Matts and Shane discuss:

• What folks would learn in a more advanced class covering VMware and how it can help shops with just two hosts all the way up to monster Enterprise organizations.
• How VMware vVols converged on some of the same instrumentation and monitoring that Tintri brought to the market with their VMstore appliance.
• How Host Profiles can be used to reset root passwords when your hosts get locked out.

If you’re a fan of Letterkenny, the Red Green show, or Schitt’s Creek, you’ll appreciate the alternative North American velvety tones of our favorite Albertan DCT guest and VMware expert, Shane.  We look forward to seeing many of you at Shane’s next Advanced vSphere class, debuting sometime in June 2022.  If you enjoy the episode, please be sure to like, share and subscribe wherever quality podcasts like Data Center Therapy may be found.  We wish our customers and new-to-IVOXY students the best in their VMware journeys (and are here to help!) and appreciate all the IVOXY learning and technology partnerships we’ve made through the years.  Thanks for listening!