VMware ESXi is the industry-leading hypervisor that is installed directly on a physical server. It is a reliable and secure solution with a tiny hardware footprint. At the same time, ESXi architecture is easy in management, patching, and updating. Recently, Mellanox has released iSER 1.0.0.1, the stable iSER driver build for ESXi. iSER is an iSCSI extension for RDMA that enables the direct data transfer out and into SCSI memory without any intermediate data copies. Here, we study the driver stability and performance to understand how the protocol streamlines ESXi environments.

Explore how Hyper-V 2022 supports live memory changes and what scenarios actually benefit from hot-add and hot-remove options.

Learn how to create a fresh AD domain with nothing but PowerShell. Ideal for scripting your lab or production setup quickly.

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.

Avoid the usual pitfalls when upgrading to vSphere 8 U3. This guide walks through every key step, from backups to post-checks.

Extend your RDS trial with a quick PowerShell trick. Ideal for headless installations where the GUI isn’t an option.

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 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).

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