In times when computing technology is moving by leaps and bounds, cloud migration happens quite often. While completely common, this process carries some dangers, such as web applications safety. It becomes an issue since you expose your sites publicly. However, if you move your servers to Azure, this won't be a problem!

Read the article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer, to find out how to deploy Azure Application Gateway.

Flotman Sp. Z o. o. faced problems with unacceptable downtime, limited performance, and aging hardware. Virtualization was a way to fix these issues for sure. They were looking for a cost-efficient hyperconvered solution suitable for Hyper-V to avoid having a single point of failure. Flotman Sp. Z o. o. united all of their servers in one Hyper-V cluster, meeting their desirable requirements.

Find out how the Flotman built a virtualized environment with StarWind and increased their performance.

The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand faced problems with low performance and high downtime and needed to scale up their storage to fix them. They were looking for a cost-efficient software-defined storage (SDS) solution suitable for Hyper-V. The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand leveraged their environment with highly available storage infrastructure.

Find out how the EGAT solved its storage resource problem and increased their performance.

Tracing your Azure’s health can be quite a challenge. Tons of daily entries delete, update, or create resources in the cloud, and some of these changes may result in a crash. For administrators, identifying which entry caused the error amidst the usual chaotic activity logs can be a problem, which may lead to severe downtime. Luckily, Log Analytics can help you solve such issues in no time.

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, and learn how to centralize Azure activity logs and what benefits it ensues.

Farmers & Merchants Bank, a US financial institution, had an infrastructure with primary and DR sites. Each of the locations had 2 Hyper-V hosts running Microsoft Server 2019 and Dell EqualLogic SAN. The organization was looking for a shared storage solution to get fault tolerance and high availability of its financial data. Thanks to StarWind, Farmers & Merchants Bank received cost-efficient and reliable shared storage with no need to buy additional SAN hardware.

Find out how Farmers & Merchants Bank gets the high intensity of I/O operations saving $60,000 on hardware with StarWind.

Seeing the full picture of how well your Azure is faring can be complicated. It can be quite problematic to consolidate its workloads visually into comprehensive documentation. Subsequently, the reports to customers on the cloud’s effectiveness can come out as too cumbersome. It can also be hard for your team and partners to assess its input into your business’ IT environment overall.

Read the article by Florent Appointaire, Microsoft Engineer, to learn how Cloudockit can help you generate thorough, user-friendly, and visually appealing content about your Azure’s workloads.

Even if you know all the backup ways and methods, you can always open a door to new knowledge. This time we’re talking about backing up Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), namely creating VM disk snapshots in order to back up a disk manually. But even in this process, you can get automation. How?

Read the article by Nicolas Prigent, a System Engineer, to find out how to automate the process of creating disk snapshots on Azure with PowerShell runbooks.

The National Archives of Estonia had a rigid IT-infrastructure built around Dell AX4-5 array interconnected via redundant FC switches and HBAs with VMware ESXi on top. The IT-environment was to become more manageable, Highly Available (HA) and optimized without getting upgraded. Thanks to StarWind, the agency was able to reinvent its existing infrastructure into a failover cluster with a flexible and cheap virtual SAN.

Find out how The National Archives of Estonia achieved HA and performance optimization with StarWind.

Fitzstone Limited, a legal service provider in Trinidad and Tobago, had 2 aging, outgoing servers with VMware ESXi on top, hosting all the company’s virtual servers, and a SAN device. There was a situation when everything was based on a single point of failure (SPOF) and all the means of protection were built on this fragile foundation. The company was to look for a shared storage solution to create a failover cluster. StarWind helped Fitzstone Limited to move to hyperconvergence using existing hardware resources, create a failover cluster ensuring constant applications uptime, and avoid the risk of a single point of failure (SPOF).

Find out how Fitzstone Limited provided high data availability (HA) and redundancy for its server at a reasonable cost with StarWind.

Updates in business processes that require using new products may entail changes in the IT environment that are meant to bump into vendor licensing conflicts. It’s especially relevant for the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP). Alternatively, the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) is more flexible to such changes. So, what do you do if you go from CSP to EA?

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to check out his guide on how to easily migrate resource groups within Azure if you’re switching from one subscription to another.

The Newtron Group, a US electrical and instrumentation contractor, had compute and storage separated scenario with 7 Gateway compute nodes, Hitachi SAN, and Hyper-V on top. Maintaining a large number of servers required considerable money. The company sought to reduce the number of servers and get active-active high availability (HA). Thanks to StarWind, the organization got cost-efficient and reliable shared storage, delivering seamless availability, and decreased the number of servers by 4 times.

Find out how the Newtron Group lowers maintenance costs thanks to StarWind.

Perfection knows no limits and so does Windows Server. Microsoft is on a crusade of ever-perfecting it, and the new version has something to say, indeed. It seems like the company might be coming after virtualization vendors. Why? Well, some of the new features include storage migration, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, and ReFS deduplication… Just saying…

Read the article by Vladan Seget, an IT and Virtualization Consultant, to learn about the Top 5 New Features in Windows Server 2019.

Stats & Reports has recently published a Profession Intelligence Report on the international Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Market. The report provides an in-depth qualitative and quantitative data analysis, as well as a dynamic vision on the HCI market size and environment. The industry was commended for providing an astoundingly positive effect on the global economy. And StarWind was included among the primary forces that research and popularize HCI among the businesses of the world.

Read the detailed breakdown of the mentioned report by IndustryTide to see how HCI changes the game for business continuity and what role StarWind plays in it.

Virtualization was always about making the most out of less. But corporations fighting over customers divided them into incompatible camps. Recently, though, the winds in the industry have changed. VMware just launched an application mobility platform that migrates and re-balances on-premises vSphere and non-vSphere (Hyper-V and KVM) infrastructures to public clouds based on VMware vCloud!

Read the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization expert, about the features and potential of the new VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) now.

Benny D’Angelo Transport, a Canadian carrier company, had an IT infrastructure built from 10 standalone servers and 3 hypervisors with QNAP Network Attached Storage (NAS) as its single point of failure (SPOF). The company’s NAS was unable to ensure high performance because of the workload and crashed a few times, leading to prolonged downtime and financial loss. Thanks to StarWind, the company was able to tie its existing IT environment into a single fault-tolerant Hyper-V cluster.

Find out how Benny D’Angelo Transport achieved redundancy and forgot about downtime with StarWind.

Chalk Mountain Services, a US oil and gas transportation and logistics provider, had a Microsoft Hyper-V environment with no shared storage and no reliability. The company was keen to create a highly available (HA) virtual server environment, thus providing faster resource control within its IT infrastructure. With StarWind, Chalk Mountain Services built a failover cluster and got the opportunity to cross VMs to other servers while maintaining HA for outages and not compromising on performance.

Find out how Chalk Mountain Services creates an HA virtual server environment satisfying budget restrictions and reliability requirements with StarWind.

How to find out the truth about a product in post-truth times? Only by reading first-hand reviews from multiple sources. IT Central Station, an online review platform, has published a new report on such Software-Defined Storage (SDS) vendors as StarWind, Red Hat, Nutanix, and DataCore. And StarWind is named the top SDS solution. Do you trust? But always cut the cards.

Read the IT Central Station report to find out what your peers are saying about SDS vendors.

Ontario School District, a US administrative body, had an outdated Virtual SAN solution that could be upgraded to a larger capacity with only significant investments. The organization was keen to get storage utilization efficiency without buying expensive software. Thanks to StarWind, the Ontario School District received shared storage, providing the previously unavailable opportunity to increase storage capacity without overpayments.

Find out how the Ontario School District gets a cost-efficient and reliable shared storage solution with disaster recovery and high availability features, all thanks to StarWind.

Azure Monitor is a feature in Windows Admin Center that is still in preview, but you can make good use of it already. So why wait? Unfortunately, some people have issues with configuring alerts in Azure Monitor and rightfully so: it has to be done through Azure Portal. But don’t fret — it’s going to take you just a few minutes to get into it and set up whatever rules you need.

Read the quick guide by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to see how you can easily enable Azure Monitor for on-prem servers and configure the desired alerts.

Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) can become cumbersome for sysadmins to maintain. They’re locked to and have to switch between many user interfaces (UIs) to keep things in check. That’s finally over. StarWind Command Center is a single-pane-of-glass management and monitoring tool to operate any HCI (Hyper-V, vSphere, KVM, etc.). Our engineer will explain its essence, demonstrate its features, use case scenarios, practical benefits, and show you that HCI management can be a game — not a bane.

Tune in to learn how you can revolutionize the way you operate your HCI with as much as just a single tool.