Some time ago, I published here comparison of SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) and SQL Server Availability Group (AG) performance while having them run on top of StarWind Virtual SAN (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/hyper-v/can-sql-server-failover-cluster-instance-run-twice-fast-sql-server-basic-availability-groups-2-node-cluster-part-2-studying-fci-performance/). Today, I measure SQL Server AG performance on Storage Spaces. The next part sheds light on SQL Server FCI performance on S2D. Can I squeeze two times more TPM out of SQL Server FCI on S2D than SQL Server AG can provide on Storage Spaces?

Windows 10 Creator Update introduced Quick Create to Hyper-V, the feature allowing to create a custom VM from a Hyper-V Quick Create gallery image. It is a handy tool for testing new software or OS features which developers and guys in QA may enjoy a lot. This being said, I describe today how to create a VM template and add it to a gallery.

Since Windows Server 2019 release, the Internet is booming with its reviews. Someday, I maybe write my own one too. Till then, why don’t we focus on something more important than just listing new Windows Server features? In today’s post, I share the scripts for creating and formatting bootable USB disks for Windows Server.

In this article, I compare deployment of Microsoft Azure SQL and SQL Server in a VM. I review the pros and cons of both approaches towards SQL Server deployment and take a closer look at cases when you may actually need each.

In this article, I’d like to compare results of the previous two and find out whether SQL Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) can provide you two times higher performance than SQL Server Basic Availability Groups (BAG).

This post addresses Hyper-V live migration – the topic which any admin faces with at some point. In my salad days of working as an admin, Hyper-V live migration was a saving grace, so I decided to write an article about it.

Live migration is Hyper-V feature for moving non-disruptively a VM from one host to another. Users love this feature for flexibility and absence of downtime. You can easily migrate a VM from one host to another and it neither idles nor has to be shut down. On top of that, live migration, when paired with failover clustering, allows building highly available and fault-tolerant systems. Well, that’s why these technologies always come hand in hand.

In this article, I want to cover some live migration and migration wizard settings that ensure maximum performance of this process.

Some time ago, I wrote an article about backup storage media. Today, I’d like to talk about secondary storage.

Before I move on, I want to clarify what I mean by “secondary storage” here, just to make sure that we are on the same page. Secondary storage is the storage where the actively used data resides. It can be both some local storage like SAN or NAS, or some public cloud hot tier. Well, it’s absolutely true that you can use disk arrays too, but let’s think of them today just as NAS-like servers packed with many disks, ok? That’s entirely up to you “which side you are on”, and there’s no “one-size-fits-all” solution. NAS, SAN, and public cloud storage… Whatever secondary storage you choose, it has own pros and cons. I discuss them in this article.

From day to day, admins troubleshoot issues remotely. And, pretty often, they cannot count on another guy who helps them to enable Remote Desktop (RD) on the remote host. There may also be the case when you loose the access to RD on another computer for some reason, and there’s no one in the remote office who can help you. Whatever, I hope you got the point. What do you need to do? Sure, you can just ask a fellow admin to enable RD on the remote host and wait a bit, but what if that’s something really urgent and you are to fix that issue in the middle of the night? Let’s think through what you can do in that case.

Sometimes, guys running home labs do not have licenses for Remote Desktop Services (RDS). Well, that’s not a big deal, you know, because Microsoft provides the 120-day grace period for the platform! However, one day the time runs out and RDS server breaks all the client connections. That day, admins are to choose between reinstalling the server and cheating a bit to reset the 120-day RDS grace period.

In my today’s topic, I discuss why PowerShell behaves like that. Specifically, I shed light on why you cannot run scripts or access a computer on a different domain. Also, I’ll take a closer look at how some cmdlets work.