StarWind Blog

Romain Serre
June 17, 2016

Manage storage QoS Policies from VMM 2016

The QoS policy was a feature included in Windows Server 2012 R2 that enabled to set a minimum and a maximum IOPS on a VHD(X). These policies were not centralized and you had to set the QoS policy on each VHD(X) independently. In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has improved this feature because the policy can now be stored in the cluster database. You can create a policy based on a minimum / maximum IOPS and/or a bandwidth. This policy can be applied to a VHD(X) (Dedicated Policy Type) or to a set of VHD(X) (Aggregated policy Type).

Anton Kolomyeytsev
June 16, 2016

Software-Defined Storage: StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware Virtual SAN

This is a comprehensive comparison of the leading products of the Software-Defined Storage market, featuring Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, VMware Virtual SAN and VSAN from StarWind. It provides numerous use cases, based on different deployment scales and architectures, because the mentioned products all have different aims. As the market is already large enough, the vendors used to dwell its different parts, but lately they entered a full-scale competition, adapting their products to meet general demand. This post is an analysis of how Microsoft, VMware and StarWind fare in in the Software-Defined Storage market right now. The approach is practical and all the statements are based on the experience of virtualization administrators and engineers from all over the world.

Oksana Zybinskaya
June 13, 2016

Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image

Microsoft has created its own edition of FreeBSD 10.3 in order to make the OS available and supported in Azure. As Jason Anderson, principal PM manager at Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center says, “Redmond took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image” so it could “ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure”.

Charbel Nemnom
June 7, 2016

How to Build a Secure PowerShell DSC Pull Server?

Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a technology introduced by Microsoft in Windows PowerShell v4.0. At the time of writing, we are at PowerShell v5.0. If you are new to PowerShell DSC, I highly encourage you to start investing and learning this awesome technology today.

Oksana Zybinskaya
June 3, 2016

The first 3D and triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs by Micron

Micron has announced its first 3D NAND SSDs, triple-level cell (3bits/cell) 1100 and 2200 products. The 1100 is a 6Gbit/s SATA product coming in 2.5-inch and M.2 SATA formats in 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB and 2048GB (2.5-inch only) capacity points, it uses 32-layer TLC NAND with 384Gb dice.

Florent Appointaire
June 2, 2016

[Azure] Custom RBAC roles

From December 2015, Microsoft has given the possibility to create your own RBAC roles. I will show you today, how to do this. To start, connect via PowerShell to your Azure RM subscription:

Alex Samoylenko
May 30, 2016

How Transparent Page Sharing memory deduplication technology works in VMware vSphere 6.0

You may know that memory page deduplication technology Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) becomes useless with large memory pages (it’s even disabled in the latest versions of VMware vSphere). However, this doesn’t mean that TPS goes into the trash bin, because when lacking resources on the host-server, ESXi may break large pages into small ones and deduplicate them afterwards. In the process, the large pages are prepared for deduplication beforehand: in case the memory workload grows up to a certain limit the large pages a broken into small ones and then, when the workload peaks, forced deduplication cycle is activated.

Oksana Zybinskaya
May 27, 2016

Citrix issues Raspberry Pi client boxes

Citrix has revealed a desktop thin client based on the Raspberry Pi microcomputer – HDX Ready Pi, which is a Citrix-built box containing the Raspberry Pi 3 hardware and a ViewSonic Linux build designed specifically to run with the Citrix HDX virtual desktop platform. The device contains a Raspberry Pi 3 board, a power supply and ports for the Pi’s HDMI, ethernet and USB connections. It connects to a XenDesktop and XenApp server that hosts the virtual instances of each individual PC.

Askar Kopbayev
May 27, 2016

NUMA and Cluster-on-die

NUMA stands for Non Unified Memory Access and Nehalem was the first generation of Intel CPUs where NUMA was presented. However, the first commercial implementation of NUMA goes back to 1985, developed in Honeywell Information Systems Italy XPS-100 by Dan Gielan.

Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Featured blog posts

All blog posts

Manage storage QoS Policies from VMM 2016

Software-Defined Storage: StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware Virtual SAN

Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image

How to Build a Secure PowerShell DSC Pull Server?

The first 3D and triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs by Micron

[Azure] Custom RBAC roles

How Transparent Page Sharing memory deduplication technology works in VMware vSphere 6.0

Citrix issues Raspberry Pi client boxes

NUMA and Cluster-on-die