iSER (the iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) delivers a number of benefits that are extremely useful for building a high-performing virtualized environment. Being supported in StarWind Virtual SAN, iSER technology makes the system faster in terms of IOPS, unloads the system’s CPU utilization, and decreases the latency between the servers.

Read the full article by Alex Khorolets, a technical support engineer at StarWind, to learn more about StarWind iSER advantages.

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition offers two features allowing to ensure High Availability for your environment and build a reliable Disaster Recovery solution. Those are Basic Availability Groups (BAGs) and Failover Cluster Instances (FCI). Although both features have their benefits, FCI also poses significant limitations. However, they can be easily removed by bringing in such Software-Defined Storage solutions as Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and StarWind Virtual SAN.

Read the full article by Dima Yaprincev, a Solutions Architect at StarWind, to learn about all the pros and cons of BAGs and FCI.

Creating a cost-efficient High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solution for your mission-critical databases in Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition is no problem.

There are two options: Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) and Basic Availability Groups (BAGs). However, the real problem arises when customers start choosing between implementing FCI or BAGs. Understanding key differences between these two features is crucial for picking up the proper HA DR solution and avoiding unnecessary expenses.

Read the White Paper by Edwin M Sarmiento, a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Microsoft Certified Master, to learn about the differences between FCI and BAGs in Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition.

As you probably know, PowerShell is a powerful scripting language. Since some time, VMware has provided PowerCLI which is a set of modules for managing VMware vSphere including VMware NSX and vSAN. These modules allow you automating a lot of routine tasks such as VM creation, host deployment, and others.

Read the full article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant in Lyon, to learn more about the PowerCLI functionality.

There have been a lot of high profile security breaches this year, including those at Equifax, Deloitte, and Disqus. Sure, once it was made clear how the breach occurred, a lot was said about how bad it is that the breaches accorded and how they should have been avoided. This is quite valid from a technical standpoint but, the reasons that these security issues were allowed to exist also depend on human factors.

Read the full article by Gary Williams, a virtualization, storage and Windows systems administrator, to learn how human factors can cause security breaches.

First introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Availability Groups (AGs) were only available in Enterprise Edition, making it challenging to switch from Database Mirroring to AGs, especially in Standard Edition. Now, this problem is solved as SQL Server 2016 introduced Basic Availability Groups (BAGs) in Standard Edition, allowing customers to run some form of limited AGs. However, there is a small trick here. Unlike Database Mirroring, AGs require deploying a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) which in its turn requires setting up Active Directory (AD).

Sounds challenging? Don’t worry, in this post, we’ll show you how to deploy BAGs without implementing Active Directory.

Read the full article by Edwin M Sarmiento, a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Microsoft Certified Master to learn more.

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)!