Hyperconvergence has dramatically transformed data center landscape over the past few years. New technologies are being developed, good old ones are being improved… We live in exciting times! And as data centers are becoming more reliable and powerful, it is important to get more out of the hardware in use: nobody likes to leave money on the table! Intel, Mellanox and StarWind have teamed up to develop a Hyper-V highly available cluster where you’ll get awesome performance without compromising ease of manageability of the environment. This article discusses the measurements in brief, showcasing the recent results.

Windows Admin Center (WAC) is a locally-deployed, browser-based management tool that provides you with the full control over your Windows Server environment. The nice thing is, it does not push you to Azure or any other cloud, so it works for you even if you do not feel that enthusiastic about public cloud.

There was a race to bring NVMe-oF to Windows some time ago. Many tried, but I know that only StarWind and Chelsio succeeded so far. Now, it’s time to see who won this race! It is the fourth part of my NVMe-oF Initiators’ performance study. Before, I tested NVMe-oF initiators developed by Linux, Chelsio and StarWind. Here, the battle ends: which NVMe-oF initiator delivers the highest performance and which one Windows admins should use

Finally, I got the hands-on experience with StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator. I read that StarWind did a lot of work to bring NVMe-oF to Windows (it’s basically the first solution of its kind), so it’s quite interesting for me to see how their initiator works! In today’s post, I measure the performance of NVMe drive presented over Linux SPDK NVMe-oF Target while talking to it over StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator.

In my previous article, I measured SQL Server Basic Availability Groups (BAG) performance. This, as it comes from the name, addresses SQL Cluster Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) performance. I expect SQL Server FCI to exhibit two times higher performance than BAG.

Before I start, I’d like to tell you one important thing about this measurement. SQL Server FCI database resides on a StarWind virtual device. Why did I choose StarWind? Because I got their NFR license some time ago and decided to give this software-defined storage solution a shot. Let’s just hope that it won’t limit SQL Server FCI performance.

Some time ago, while looking through what SQL server Basic Availability Groups (BAG) can do, I found an awesome article by Pieter Vanhove: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msftpietervanhove/2017/03/14/top-5-questions-about-basic-availability-groups/. There was nothing about performance, though, so I thought: “Hey, why not write an article about BAG performance?” Later, I realized that you need to compare this performance to something else, right? So, I decided to add SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) performance measurements. Maybe, I’ll add some SQL Server Availability Groups (AG) measurements at the end; but, let’s see first whether SQL Server FCI can run twice as fast as SQL Server BAG.

In this study, I measured BAG performance alone. Now, as we know the scope of the article, let’s move on!

In this post, I am going to take a closer look at the impact of read-only routing on SQL Server Availability Groups performance.

I measured SQL Server Availability Groups (AG) performance before (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/hyper-v/can-sql-server-failover-cluster-instance-run-s2d-twice-fast-sql-server-availability-groups-storage-spaces-part-1-studying-ag-performance/). And, a guy from Reddit  recommended enabling read-only routing to achieve higher performance (find more about this policy here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/configure-read-only-routing-for-an-availability-group-sql-server?view=sql-server-2017). Thanks for your comment, man! I highly appreciate your efforts. This article will shed light on how read-only routing affects SQL Server AG performance.

NVMe is quite a promising technology that becomes more and more prevalent in IT environments of any size. PCIe SSDs deliver awesome performance, low latencies… still, they are far too expensive. Anyway, money, in this case, seems a problem of secondary importance. The main reason why many have not added NVMe drives to their servers yet is inability of this storage media to be presented effectively over the network: iSCSI seems to be inefficient for flash, so it is an issue. Solution? NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF or NVMf, how it was called before) – the protocol created to present NVMe flash over the network!

Setting up a failover cluster is a thing that admins must do. To build such cluster, you need to configure shared storage. And, there are a lot of ways to do that. Today, I’d like to discuss how to build a Windows Failover Cluster using a virtual SAN solution (StarWind Virtual SAN) as a shared storage provider.

Since I’m done with measuring SQL Server Availability Groups (AG) on Storage Spaces and SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) on Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) performance, I can write the most interesting part in this series: performance comparison.