Need to RDP into a system that has RDP disabled? Use this trick to turn it on remotely in just a few steps.

Skip the UI clicks. Learn how to use PowerCLI to quickly create and manage vSwitches and port groups.

Make a bootable USB installer for Microsoft Windows Server 2022 in minutes. Works for both GUI and Core editions.

This post shares my hands-on experience testing StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator for Windows with a Linux SPDK NVMe-oF Target. The goal was to evaluate how efficiently the initiator handles NVMe drives presented over RDMA and see how close it can get to local device performance.

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.

Server virtualization helped businesses increase productivity and efficiency of their IT infrastructures by abstracting physical servers’ workloads from the underlying hardware with little to no loss of functionality, VDI applied quite the same logic. Desktops and applications run inside virtual machines that are hosted centrally, either on a server or in the cloud. The purpose of VDI is to deliver fully-featured user desktops to a variety of devices including conventional PCs, thin clients, and even zero-client endpoints. But how something that was seen as a bright alternative to the traditional server-based computing model used by Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services a decade ago ended up being a niched deployment?

Compare Azure SQL and SQL Server in a VM from cost, performance, and manageability angles.

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!

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.