ITS Cloud News

👋 Hello from the ITS Private Cloud! Welcome to issue 2023.3. Read on for ITS Private Cloud news, tools, security advisories and features released within the last month (or so).

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News

Moving towards secure by default Virtual Machines (pt 2)
New virtual machines will have pre-defined settings to enhance security based on VMware vSphere Security Guide.
Billing and Rate Changes
We will be transitioning from the current advanced annual billing model to a usage-based monthly billing model and implementing the rate increase in a phased approach over the next three years for the ITS Private Cloud service. These service rates and billing procedures will come into effect May 1st, 2023.

How-To's

Enable Multi-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication is an additional layer of security designed to prevent unauthorized access to your account and protect access to the Virtual Machines and other data you store with the ITS Private Cloud. Please, consider enabling MFA.
Upgrade a virtual machine to the latest supported hardware version
Virtual hardware 13 or newer is highly recommended. It enables CPU features which reduce the performance impact of the mitigations for various CPU vulnerabilities.

Tools & Formulas

VSS Command Line Interface (vss-cli) v2023.3.0
VSS Command Line Interface (vss-cli) v2023.3.1
compute vm set disk up --confirm flag to prompt for confirmation
ITS Private Cloud CLI Cheat Sheet📝
Most popular vss-cli commands including VM deployment, changes, retirement requests, MFA, folders, etc.

Notes

ITS Private Cloud Guideline: Virtual Machine Snapshot Management
A virtual machine snapshot is not a copy so it cannot be treated as a direct backup. A snapshot file is simply a log of changes to the original virtual disk. The Maximum lifetime for a VM snapshot is 72 hours.

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