When it comes to upgrading VMware vSphere, there are various approaches to do that on your ESXi hosts. Some methods are more simple while other offer more advantages when upgrading at scale, and some are more prone to user error. In this post, we’ll take a look at each option and discuss its benefits and drawbacks.

Read the full article by Mike Preston, Toronto VMUG Co-Leader and vExpert, to learn more about different options for upgrading VMware ESXi hosts.

There’s no IT administrator who likes finding out his environment is down or even worth – getting it from the end users. In this webinar, we’ll show you how to achieve the highest uptime possible for your environment with smallest personal time contributed using basic monitoring and alerting tools. But what is more important, we’ll tell you how you can get a true peace of mind and free yourself from the burden of constant environment monitoring and issue resolution with StarWind ProActive Support.

Join our Live Tap Room and learn how you can easily solve your IT infrastructure support pain with StarWind.
Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-proactive-support-is-a-remedy-to-it-infrastructure-support-pain

RVTools is a Windows .NET 4.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual environments. It connects to your vCenter Server and provides detailed reports on your virtual machines and ESXi hosts. What is more, it can perform a health check of the whole infrastructure by analyzing the most important properties which every admin should watch out for.

Read the full article by Vladan Seget, IT and Virtualization consultant, to learn more about RVTools functionality.

First introduced in Microsoft Windows Server 2012, Storage Spaces is a feature providing fault tolerance to virtual disks using mirroring, parity, or even both. Basically, it serves as a distributed, software RAID aggregating the drives in the pool. Thus, it becomes a perfect fit for building Multi-Resilient Tier on Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

Read the full article by Vitalii Feshchenko, a support Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to configure Multi-Resilient Volume on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 using Storage Spaces.

@dafyre Exactly That is the reason why this feature was created

Everyone knows that any production environment sometimes needs to be maintained due to a software update or hardware reconfiguration. To do this, you should stop your production server for a certain period which may lead to the decrease of the fault tolerance level and performance.

This can be easily avoided with StarWind Maintenance Mode. It eliminates the downtimes caused by the planned nodes shutdowns, keeping the constantly high level of performance and availability.

Read the full article by Ivan Talaichuk, a Solutions Engineer at StarWind, to learn about StarWind Maintenance Mode in action.

With PowerShell, automatic deployment of Hyper-V VMs in Windows Server 2016 becomes a piece of cake
No doubts, commercial software for automatic VM deployment is great, but it may be too expensive comparing to the goals that need to be achieved. That’s where PowerShell kicks in. With PowerShell commands, the creation and configuration of Hyper-V virtual machines in Windows Server 2016 become a fairly simple thing. But, what is more important, you can create a script which deploys VMs of the same configuration automatically.

Read the full article by Boris Yurchenko, a Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to automate your VMs deployment with PowerShell in Windows Server 2016.

AlwaysOn Basic Availability Groups (BAG) supported in SQL Server Standard Edition and AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AG) introduced in SQL Server Enterprise Edition were designed to create a replicated environment with improved failover capabilities. However, the two types provide different capabilities while also requiring different licensing costs.

Read the full article by Shashank Singh, Microsoft MVP, and SQL Server Architect to learn more about BAG and AG cost and functionality differences.

Veeam Powered Network (VeeamPN) is a free Veeam solution that supplements the Veeam functionality of restore to Microsoft Azure and allows you creating a VPN connection between remote sites over the public network.
Veeam PN network infrastructure may have any configuration. For example, it may be an environment with a Veeam PN Server virtual machine in Azure, Veeam PN Gateway client’s software in three geographically separated datacenters, or even external private network users connecting via OpenVPN Client.

Read the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization technology professional, to learn how Veeam PN allows you connecting various physical networks into one private company network and prepare for disaster recovery in Azure.

Before expanding your IT environment, it is crucial to know its workloads. That's when Veeam One Reporter comes in handy. This solution allows estimating such infrastructure properties as IO rate, throughput, and the extent of capacity and memory utilization in a straightforward and convenient way. It delivers all this information in server reports that can be displayed in a web browser, exported to different formats or scheduled for automatic delivery via email.

Join our Live Tap Room to learn how to evaluate your hardware performance with Veeam One Reporter.
Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/estimate-your-it-system-performance-easily-with-veeam-one-reporter

Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 allows accomplishing multiple tasks and using a wide variety of Outlook features on phones, tablets, desktop, and the Web. It can be installed on Windows Server 2016 using either PowerShell or Graphical User Interface (GUI). This post will tell you how to install Exchange Server 2016 with the help of GUI.

Read the full article by Karim Buzdar, a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate for Server Infrastructure.

This set of articles is dedicated to providing High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) options overview for SQL Server. In this very first part, we will guide you through the process of configuring SQL Server AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances (FCI).

AlwaysOn FCI is a natural part of the SQL Server AlwaysOn HA / DR strategy and has been designed to protect your SQL Server infrastructure from the unplanned cluster node failures. With this tech, even if one of your nodes goes down, the SQL Server will continue running on one of the remaining cluster nodes with zero downtime and no data loss to meet the most strict RTO / RPO requirements.

Read the full article by Bogdan Savchenko, a Solutions Engineer at StarWind, referencing our technical paper created with Data Platform MVP Shashank Singh to learn how to configure SQL Server AlwaysOn FCI in a detailed step-by-step walkthrough style.

Maintenance Mode is a StarWind Virtual SAN feature that eliminates the downtimes caused by the planned nodes’ shutdowns. It allows keeping nodes in the pre-synchronized state so that synchronization resumption is not needed. As a result, the system doesn’t experience any performance and availability degradation.

Discover all the benefits of StarWind Virtual SAN new feature - Maintenance Mode.

Watch the video: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/increase-system-uptime-with-new-starwind-feature-maintenance-mode

StarWind takes part in Storage Focus 2017 in Barcelona, Hammer’s established channel event dedicated to delivering a comprehensive view of the changing storage, server & networking marketplace. It will bring together more than 20 leading industry vendors to showcase their products, exchange information and experience.
Watch StarWind elevator pitch video on Twitter @hammerplc at 3.30 pm (GMT+2)!

Microsoft has extended the Azure functionality with Nested Virtualization support for Dv3 and Ev3 VM sizes recently.

What you get with StarWind’s help is the ability to create a “stretched” Hyper-V cluster between on-premises and Azure. By configuring Failover Clustering with StarWind Virtual SAN handling distributed shared storage across locations, you achieve the maximum level of availability and redundancy for your mission critical data and applications: you can juggle with your virtual machines and decide where you want to run them: on-site or in Azure. Live Migrate, failover, HA etc.: you can treat your Azure instance as your Hyper-V cluster node.

Read the full article by Dmytro Malynka, a Solutions Architect at StarWind, to learn more about the Nested Virtualization support in Azure and what StarWind does to bring it to another level.

Server maintenance is usually followed by the time- and effort consuming period of synchronization resumption. Furthermore, the system performance drops significantly since only one node is running the entire production. Fortunately, this scenario can be avoided by setting the StarWind infrastructure in the “maintenance” mode.
In this Tap Room, StarWind expert discusses the benefits of the StarWind "maintenance" mode and demonstrates the feature working.

Join our live session to find out a way to keep the system running as fast as usual right after maintenance!

Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/increase-system-uptime-with-new-starwind-feature-maintenance-mode

StarWind works on the cutting edge of virtualization. We build reliable infrastructures that are powered by StarWind Virtual SAN, the high-performing, and fault-tolerant Software-Defined Storage platform. What is more, we offer the ProActive Support, the service aimed at the elimination of infrastructure problems before they result in severe failures. Last, StarWind Cloud VTL for AWS and Veeam accelerates the backup process and provides a ransomware-proof virtual vault for tapes.

Discover the power of StarWind hyperconvrged, SDS and backup solutions. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-storage-solutions-for-any-needs?utm_source=mangolassi&utm_medium=mangolassi&utm_campaign=ecocast_webinar_09_08

Ceph is a unified, distributed storage system delivering the ability to scale up to exabyte level while maintaining high reliability. This makes Ceph attractive for workloads’ distribution, storing and replication of data. Thus, StarWind has utilized Ceph in its new Enterprise Storage Appliance to provide it with infinite scalability.

Learn how your storage can be scaled simply and run smoothly with Ceph.
Watch now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/discovering-ceph-easily-scalable-and-highly-reliable-storage-platform?utm_source=mangolassi&utm_medium=mangolassi&utm_campaign=tap_room_ceph_17_08

VMware Labs often posts useful tools that can help VMware administrators manage their vSphere virtualization infrastructure much easier. These instruments were developed by VMware Engineers, Community, and Open Source. As for 2017, the most handy utilities presented on VMware Labs are vSphere HTML5 Web Client, ESXi Embedded Host Client, VisualEsxtop, VMware OS Optimization Tool and Horizon Toolbox.

Read the full article by Dmytro Malynka, a Solutions Architect at StarWind, to take a closer look at these awesome tools.
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/top-utilities-for-your-vsphere-infrastructure

As new applications appear every day, requiring more and more compute power, it is vital to timely upgrade the hardware to match those performance needs. That’s where StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comes into play. It’s a turnkey solution for building a high-performing virtualization infrastructure. It comes fully customized to meet your needs and covered with StarWind ProActive Support, making it a perfect choice for upgrading your IT infrastructure.

Learn more about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/replace-piles-of-outdated-hardware-with-high-performing-starwind-hyperconverged-appliance