Nowadays, IT administrators should be able to keep a finger on the pulse of their environment 24/7 no matter where they are. To achieve this, StarWind has added Web-based management functionality allowing to access your StarWind-based infrastructure from any remote location and from any device with an HTML5-capable web browser. All you need to do is deploy StarWind Gateway VM or StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance, and you get the full control over the storage-related operations.

Read the full article to learn how to deploy StarWind Gateway VM and get a remote access to your StarWind infrastructure.

Back in the day, the Redundant Array of Independent Disks technology, or simply RAID, was considered the king of the storage landscape. Now, however, we see some evident and growing challenges around common RAID levels that are pushing storage makers to turn to alternative data protection mechanisms.

Read the full article by Karim Buzdar, a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate for Server Infrastructure to learn if RAID is the right solution to protect your data.

Microsoft Intune is a service allowing to manage the mobility of your IT environment, including mobile devices and laptops. All you need to do is enroll the users’ devices in Intune and you're good to go: deploy new apps, set their protection policies or monitor all your applications on devices where users use Intune.

Read the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies, to learn how to work with Microsoft Intune.

vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) is a pre-configured Linux virtual machine designed for managing the whole vSphere infrastructure. Over several VCSA releases, VMware managed to make this product equal to the Windows-based one and pushes the development even further. However, many VMware admins are also Microsoft guys and like the graphical user interface to work with. However, we have 5 hints that will help you managing vCSA just as easily as you do with the Windows-based vCenter server.

Read the full article by Vladan Seget, an IT and Virtualization consultant, to learn how to manage VMware vCenter Server Appliance with ease.

Migrating your VMs from one hypervisor to another may be quite a complicated task if there’s no decent virtual machine converter at hand. Fortunately, there are various V2V tools allowing to turn this process into a simple thing. But, when choosing a V2V converter, there are several factors you should take into consideration.

Read the full article to learn how to choose a V2V converter that will become a perfect fit for your needs.

Throughout 2017, StarWind has added several features to its Software-Defined Storage Solution – StarWind Virtual SAN, that takes its functionality to an entirely new level. Now, StarWind Virtual SAN not only provides high-performing and fault-tolerant storage for VMs but also brings best of private and public clouds to your existing infrastructure. Moreover, with StarWind VSAN, submitting support tickets becomes a legacy since it’s covered by ProActive Support allowing to resolve issues before they even appear.
Check out: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-new-features-and-extended-functionality

During its lifetime, any system reaches a point when it needs to be upgraded, either in terms of hardware or software. So, if you want to take your Windows Failover Cluster functionality to a next level, Cluster Rolling Upgrade will come in handy. The procedure allows upgrading Windows Failover Cluster nodes from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016 with no production interruption.

Read the full article by Boris Yurchenko, a Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to upgrade your Windows Failover Cluster with no downtime.

StarWind Hybrid Cloud provides true hybrid cloud functionality for your existing Hyper-V infrastructure by extending it to the Azure public cloud. StarWind replicates the data between the locations, allowing to migrate workloads and create a Highly Available cluster on-premises and Azure. Furthermore, the solution is exceptionally simple to manage thanks to 5nine Manager.

Watch this video to learn more about all the benefits of StarWind Hybrid Cloud: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/manage-your-azure-hybrid-cloud-workloads-with-5nine-and-starwind

BitLocker it is the encryption technology from Microsoft, allowing to encrypt the host’s underlying storage logical volumes and Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). By utilizing this technology, your data gets reliable protection from unauthorized access to physical and clustered logical volumes.

Read the full article by Ivan Ischenko, a Technical Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to improve your data security with Microsoft BitLocker.

Split brain is a state when active cluster nodes lose all synchronization and heartbeat connections between them, which may lead to some serious errors. It can be a real nightmare for a system administrator to deal with the split brain consequences. To solve the problem once and for all, StarWind offers several reliable strategies allowing to prevent a split brain syndrome, and one of them is Node Majority Strategy.

Read the full article by Sergey Sanduliak, a Technical Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to avoid a split brain.

The previous article has described the overall goal of the project and all the details behind 3 scenarios for tuning and testing NVMe over Fabrics performance. Now, it’s the prime time to gear up and shift from theory to practice and prepare all the components of our testing environment.

Read the full article by Taras Shved, a Director of Sales Engineering at StarWind, to learn how to properly configure NVMe over Fabrics for its further testing.

There’s a common opinion that the performance in general and IOPS-intensive performance like NVMf [NVMe over Fabrics] is usually lower in virtualized environments due to the hypervisor overhead.

Check out this article to prove or knock down this belief!

The previous post has covered the Microsoft Storage Spaces configuration process. Now, it’s time to see how you can accelerate your virtualization infrastructure performance and increase its resiliency by combining Virtual SAN (vSAN) with different types of Microsoft Storage Spaces: Simple and Mirror.

[Read the full article](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/starwind-ha-device-on-storage-spaces-performance-testing) by Vitalii Feshchenko, a Post-Sales Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn more.

StarWind Virtual SAN provides VMs with virtual shared storage by mirroring the internal resources between the configured cluster nodes. In this way, the mirrored storage is treated just as local by both hypervisors and clustered applications, eliminating any need for physical shared storage. When you consider upgrading StarWind Virtual SAN to a newer version, you should follow a specific upgrade sequence and procedure to ensure that everything goes smoothly and without any service downtime.

Read the full article by Paolo Valsecchi, a System Engineer, VCP-DCV, vExpert, VMCE, Veeam Vanguard, and PernixPro, to learn how to properly upgrade StarWind Virtual SAN.

There’s, probably, no such IT administrator who doesn’t care about the performance of his environment. That’s why StarWind HyperConverged and Enterprise Storage Appliances utilize RDMA-enabled networking from Mellanox, maximizing your IT infrastructure performance.

Join this webinar to learn how to increase the performance and efficiency of your virtualization environment.

Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/maximize-the-performance-and-minimize-the-overhead-of-your-it-infrastructure

SMB3 is the latest version of a Server Message Block protocol that was introduced back in Windows Server 2012. Each release included some new features and improvements, so now SMB3 comes with a set of such useful capabilities like SMB Transparent Failover, SMB Encryption, VSS for SMB file shares, SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), and SMB Multichannel. All of this makes SMB3 a perfect option when creating a Highly Available Network Share within the Windows Server Failover Cluster.

Read the full article by Ivan Talaichuk, a Solutions Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to create a high-performing and highly available Scale-Out File Server using SMB3.

It’s literally impossible to make a proper decision when choosing between private and public cloud. So, instead of endless comparison, go for StarWind Hybrid Cloud and get the best of both clouds in a single solution. StarWind Hybrid Cloud seamlessly integrates into any environment and fits any company, be it an SMB or Enterprise.

Join our webinar to learn more about the benefits of StarWind Hybrid Cloud and why it’s better than other solutions present on the market.

Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/hybrid-cloud-combining-the-best-of-private-and-public-clouds

Network File System (NFS) is a handy solution when you need to give the transparent remote access to the files over the network. What is more, the functionality of the NFS file server allows creating access lists for users and manage the permissions to the files. On top of that, you can access files in the NFS share as fast as if they were stored locally.

Read the full article by Alex Khorolets, a technical support engineer at StarWind, to learn how to access your files remotely using NFS.

During the webinar, you will find out how to easily manage Azure VMs, schedule and restore their backups, and centrally monitor Azure and Hyper-V VMs in the same location.

Register now: http://info.5nine.com/webinar-simplify-azure-management-with-5nine-and-starwind

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Basic Availability Groups (BAGs) replace the deprecated Database Mirroring feature and deliver a high availability solution for mission-critical databases in Standard Edition.
Sure, the process of implementing BAGs without Active Directory is not an easy task. But, it does give you a very deep understanding of what makes it work – from the external dependencies like networking and DNS to the different processes that make up SQL Server Always On Availability Groups.

Read the full article by Edwin M Sarmiento, a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Microsoft Certified Master to learn how to deploy Basic Availability Groups without Active Directory.