Microsoft - AZ-800: Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure

Sample Questions

• Enable Remote SSH Access on Server2.
• Sign in to Server1 as User1.

Explanation:

On Windows Server with OpenSSH, you use the SSH client command ssh, not sshd, which is the server/daemon process.  

When signing in with an Active Directory domain account, the correct username format is:

Domain\User@Host

OpenSSH for Windows

OpenSSH is the open-source version of the Secure Shell (SSH) tools used by administrators of Linux and other non-Windows for cross-platform management of remote systems. Beginning with Windows 10 build 1809 and Windows Server 2019, OpenSSH is available as a feature on demand.

SSH is based on a client-server architecture where the system the user is working on is the client and the remote system being managed is the server. OpenSSH includes a range of components and tools designed to provide a secure and straightforward approach to remote system administration.

References:

OpenSSH for Windows overview

Get started with OpenSSH for Windows

• A two-way mirror
• A parity storage layout

Explanation:

Storage Spaces (not to be confused with storage spaces direct (S2D)) in Windows Server is a robust storage virtualization technology that enables you to efficiently manage, protect, and scale your storage infrastructure. It allows you to aggregate multiple physical drives into a single logical storage pool, from which you can create virtual disks known as Storage Spaces. These virtual disks can be provisioned with various resiliency options, providing redundancy, fault tolerance, and flexibility to meet diverse storage requirements. It's conceptually similar to redundant array of independent disks (RAID)

Mirror spaces

Mirror spaces provide redundancy by duplicating data across two or three copies, known as two-way or three-way mirroring. This configuration ensures data availability and protection against drive failures. If one drive fails, data remains accessible from the mirrored copies on other drives. Mirror spaces offer excellent read and write performance, making them suitable for performance-sensitive workloads and critical data storage.

Here are some key characteristics of mirror spaces:

• Data is duplicated across two or more drives for redundancy.
• Two-way mirroring tolerates one drive failure; three-way mirroring tolerates two simultaneous drive failures.
• Excellent read and write performance.
• Higher storage overhead due to data duplication (50% overhead for two-way mirroring, approximately 66% overhead for three-way mirroring).
• Ideal for mission-critical workloads, databases, and virtual machine storage.

Two-way mirror stores two copies of the data. As long as one copy of each data block survives, the virtual disk remains intact. With 10 disks, the theoretical maximum is 5 failed disks (assuming no mirrored pair loses both copies).

Parity spaces

Parity spaces provide fault tolerance by distributing parity information across multiple drives. This parity information allows Storage Spaces to reconstruct data if a single drive fails (single parity) or two drives fail (dual parity). Parity spaces offer more efficient storage utilization compared to mirror spaces, but they have lower write performance due to the overhead of calculating and writing parity data. Parity spaces are well-suited for archival storage, backup repositories, and workloads with predominantly sequential read operations.

Here are some key characteristics of parity spaces:

• Data is striped across multiple drives with parity information for fault tolerance.
• Parity information allows data reconstruction if a drive fails.
• More efficient storage utilization compared to mirror spaces.
• Lower write performance due to parity calculations.
• Good read performance, especially for sequential workloads.
• Ideal for archival storage, backups, and workloads with lower write performance requirements.

Parity storage spaces provide single-parity protection, similar to RAID 5. Single parity can recover from only one disk failure, regardless of whether you use 3 disks or 10 disks. A second disk failure causes data loss. Therefore, only 1 disk can fail without data loss.

References:

Storage Spaces overview in Windows Server

Deploy Storage Spaces on a stand-alone server

Explanation:

Machine configuration uses PowerShell Desired State Configuration (PSDSC) when auditing and configuring both Windows and Linux. The DSC configuration defines the condition that the machine should be in.

To create an Azure Machine Configuration (Guest Configuration) package for Windows Server VMs, the correct workflow is based on how Machine Configuration is built on PowerShell DSC.

1. Create a PS1 file

• You start by authoring a PowerShell DSC configuration in a .ps1 file.
• This defines the desired state you want to audit or enforce on the VM.

2. Generate a MOF file

• The DSC configuration (.ps1) is compiled to produce a MOF file, which contains the actual configuration instructions consumed by Machine Configuration.

3. Generate a ZIP file

• The MOF file (and supporting files) are packaged into a ZIP file, which becomes the Machine Configuration package uploaded and referenced by Azure Policy.

Reference: How to create custom machine configuration package artifacts

Explanation:

The Azure Automation Process Automation feature supports several types of runbooks, as defined in the following table.

For Azure Automation runbooks, the most granular built-in schedule recurrence is hourly. When you link a runbook to a schedule in Azure Automation, you can choose one-time or recurring schedules such as hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, but minute-based recurrence isn’t supported natively.

References:

Azure Automation runbook types

Manage schedules in Azure Automation

Explanation:

In many cases a Dockerfile instruction will need to span multiple lines. To do this, you can use an escape character. The default Dockerfile escape character is a backslash \. However, because the backslash is also a file path separator in Windows, using it to span multiple lines can cause problems. To get around this, you can use a parser directive to change the default escape character.

To modify the escape character, place an escape parser directive on the very first line of the Dockerfile. This can be seen in the following example.

# escape=`

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019

RUN powershell.exe -Command `
    $ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'; `
    wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.5.1/python-3.5.1.exe -OutFile c:\python-3.5.1.exe ; `
    Start-Process c:\python-3.5.1.exe -ArgumentList '/quiet InstallAllUsers=1 PrependPath=1' -Wait ; `
    Remove-Item c:\python-3.5.1.exe -Force

Only two values can be used as escape characters: \ and `.

Reference: Dockerfile on Windows