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Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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Orest Lesyuk

Microsoft SQL Server High Availability: Always On Availability Groups VS Failover Cluster Instances. What to choose and when?

Microsoft SQL Server is the backbone of many businesses, but when it comes to high availability, which path should you take: Always On Availability Groups (AG) or Failover Cluster Instances (FCI)?

Alex Khorolets

Turn two VMware vSphere hosts into a full-blown cluster without breaking the bank, in 5 easy steps

Security, privacy, and performance have always been a priority for many businesses even over the limitless scalability offered by the cloud. Join us for a new video, on how to transform two on-prem VMware vSphere hosts into a bulletproof high-availability (HA) cluster for improved cost-effectiveness, high VM performance and enhanced security, in 5 easy steps.

PeerSpot

Ensuring Business Continuity and High Availability With StarWind Virtual SAN

Want to optimize your storage infrastructure? Learn how StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) helps organizations achieve high availability and resilience.

Vladyslav Savchenko

Setting up StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) as Hardened Repository for Veeam B&R

Worried about keeping your business data safe from ransomware and other threats? Discover how StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) can fortify your backup strategy as a hardened repository for Veeam Backup & Replication (B&R).

Kevin Soltow

ESXi is free… So why would you buy an ESXi anyway?

Most admins know that VMware offers Free and Evaluation versions of their hypervisor. However, there are still some nuances that explain why people would actually buy ESXi.

Hanna Parich

How to Convert Hyper-V to VMware VM

VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V are among the most popular type 1 enterprise hypervisors. However, their VM formats are incompatible, and it is not uncommon for users to look for an easy way to migrate a virtual machine from one hypervisor to another.

Diana Abo Harmouch

What is V2V (Virtual to Virtual)?

V2V in Focus: What’s virtual-to-virtual migration all about? Learn what V2V is, why it matters, and how it works. Check out reasons for migration, hot vs. cold migration, and tools like StarWind V2V Converter.

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Boris Yurchenko

Don’t break your fingers with hundreds of clicks – automate Windows iSCSI connections

If you have a single environment with only several iSCSI targets discovered from a couple of target portals, messing with automation may not be worth it. Yet, if you have multiple environments with a bunch of portals and targets that need to be discovered and connected, and all of them are more or less similar in terms of configuration, you might find your resort in automating the whole process. I hope to post some other automation things here, so tune in and check the StarWind blog from time to time.

Nicolas Prigent

How to Use Azure DevTest Labs?

Official Microsoft description:
“Azure DevTest Lab is a service that helps developers and testers to quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. You can test latest version of your application by quickly provisioning Windows and Linux environments using reusable templates and artifacts.”

In other words, Azure DevTest Labs is a great service that will help you to implement DevOps in your organization. Azure DevTest Labs will allows you to easily deploy Virtual Machines in order to test your workload in Azure. Setting up a development and test environment can take lots of time for your Ops Team.

Didier Van Hoye

Replacing a Veeam Agent for Windows host while preserving existing local or share backups

Imagine you have a server with data source volumes that are backed up to local (or a share) target backup volumes with Veeam Agent for Windows (VAW). You might or might not backup the OS as well. That server is old, has issues or has crashed beyond repair and needs to be replaced. You don’t really care all that much about the server OS potentially but you do care about your data backup history! You don’t want to lose all those restore points. Basically, we try to answer how do you replace the backup server when it’s a local Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 deployment.

Dmytro Malynka

Nested Virtualization in Azure with StarWind Virtual SAN. Part 2: Hybrid Cloud

You all probably know that our main goal is delivering all the “building blocks” required to construct a full-stack IT infrastructure. This is ensured by a portfolio that has solutions for most business problems for IT systems. With the ever-increasing popularity of cloud computing, StarWind has recently created an easy-entry-to-cloud solution suitable for any businesses. It ensures that your data is always safe and readily available, regardless of outside factors. Before we take a deep dive into StarWind Hybrid Cloud, let’s overview common cloud deployment models.

Kevin Soltow

Why Snapshots and Checkpoints Alone Aren’t for Backups

Typically, snapshots are used to return a virtual machine to its previous state in case of any errors during updates or configuration changes. Thus, they will save your system from unpredictable failures. But please, do not consider a snapshot as a backup and vice versa!

Let’s be honest, snapshots are not backups. Each snapshot is associated with a certain set of indices (or a single index) to refer other blocks on the disk. If the corresponding storage goes down, you’ll lose all your data because you’ll be unable to restore everything from a snapshot. Based on this, be smart and do not rely on them and use the proper set of tools for backups. In other words, use a hammer for nails and screwdriver for screws.

Nicolas Prigent

Migrate On-Premises VHD files to Azure

You may need to move a couple of Azure Virtual Machines from on-premises to your Azure subscription. Thanks to Windows PowerShell, uploading a VM to Azure is really easy to do! You must check only one prerequisite before uploading your VM to Azure: you will need to check what type of virtual hard disk is being used by the virtual machine. Hyper-V can use either VHD or VHDX based virtual hard disks. However, only VHD disks can be uploaded to Azure. Azure does not support VHDX disks.

Dmytro Khomenko

Full throttling your storage performance with P3700 Intel NVMe

The most important part of any server infrastructure is the performance of the underlying storage which creates a direct dependency on the performance of the mission-critical applications. With all the available options for selecting the highest-performing underlying storage for your host taken into account, as well as the consideration of a lot of finger pointing once a storage array doesn’t perform according to plan, the responsibility involved makes the decision even more difficult than it seems.

Kateryna Rudenko

Managing StarWind Virtual SAN infrastructure in a web browser. Part 2: StarWind VSA

Currently, there are two options for managing StarWind-based infrastructure via web: StarWind Gateway VM and StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). So today, I’m gonna describe the second option which allows easily managing your VSAN from StarWind infrastructure from any point of the world using any web browser. StarWind Linux-based Virtual Storage Appliance is the best way to instantly deploy VSAN from StarWind to test its functions without having to change your already-existing infrastructure. StarWind VSA supports all industry-standard hypervisors such as Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and KVM and includes Web Management Console allowing to use any HTML5-capable web browser. StarWind VSA is really simple to deploy and manage, requiring no special skills from the on-site IT-team.

Kevin Soltow

A few advices that will make your VDI sizing easier

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?

Vitalii Feshchenko

The main features of 2016 Failover Cluster

In our support work very often we face different environments. They can range from three VMs to a hundred of those, with the number of nodes from two to ten. Today, I will tell you about the main features of Failover Cluster 2016, which are applicable to any environment.