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Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

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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)?

Turn two VMware vSphere hosts into a full-blown cluster without breaking the bank, in 5 minutes and 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.

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.

StarWind SAN & NAS as Hardened Repository for Veeam B&R

Ransomware is a global threat, and the best answer to it is to have immutable backups. Veeam’s Hardened Backup Repository is an efficient and cost-effective solution, but it can require some effort to configure. StarWind simplifies the process, allowing you to easily set up an immutable backup repository with just a few clicks.

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.

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.

Windows Server 2022 Hyper-V VM Licensing

Software and feature licensing is often complex, requiring in-depth expertise to be licensed correctly and efficiently. Microsoft ecosystem is no exception.

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Getting Started with Azure Resource Manager and Azure Deployment – Part III

In part two of this multi part blog series, we covered the creation and configuration of a GitHub account, to host a GitHub repository for a Quick Start template, and then we examined Visual Studio Code integration with Git and lastly we pushed commits to a remote repository on GitHub.

In the final post, we will modify and deploy sample and custom template and parameter JSON files.

If you missed Part I and Part II, please make sure to check them here Part I and Part II before you continue with the last part.

Getting Started with Azure Resource Manager and Azure Deployment – Part II

In part one of this multi part blog series, we explained the benefits of Azure Resource Manager and resource groups in Azure V2 versus the Service Management API in Azure V1, then we looked in depth at JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Quick Start templates. In the second part, Part II: we will create and configure a GitHub account, if you don’t already have one, to host a GitHub repository for a Quick Start template, and lastly we will examine Visual Studio Code integration with Git and push commits to a remote repository. In the final post, we will modify and deploy sample/custom template and parameter JSON files.
If you missed Part I, please make sure to check it here before you continue with this post.

A closer look at NUMA Spanning and virtual NUMA settings

With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V became truly NUMA aware.  A virtual NUMA topology is presented to the guest operating system. By default, the virtual NUMA topology is optimized by matching the NUMA topology of physical host. This enables Hyper-V to get the optimal performance for virtual machines with high performance, NUMA aware workloads where large numbers of vCPUs and lots of memory come into play. A great and well known example of this is SQL Server.

Virtual Volumes (VVols) backup – how it works and which solutions should be used

Many of you have heard of Virtual Volumes (VVols) storage technology, which allows essential increasing of storage I/O performance within VMware vSphere environment by using logical volumes for certain virtual machines components and transferring of some storage operations to disk arrays.

Manage It Already

As I review the marketing pitches of many software-defined storage products today, I am concerned by the lack of attention in any of the software stack descriptions to any capabilities whatsoever for managing the underlying hardware infrastructure. This strikes me as a huge oversight.

The truth is that delivering storage services via software — orchestrating and administering the delivery of capacity, data encryption, data protection and other services to the data that are hosted on a software-defined storage volume – is only half of the challenge of storage administration. The other part is maintaining the health and integrity of the gear and the interconnect cabling that provide the all-important physical underlayment of an increasingly virtualized world.

Getting Started with Azure Resource Manager and Azure Deployment – Part I

Applications that are deployed in Microsoft Azure often comprise different but related cloud resources, such as virtual machines, web applications, SQL databases, virtual networks among others. Before the introduction of Azure Resource Manager (Azure V2), it was necessary to define and provision these resources imperatively. However, Azure Resource Manager gives you the ability to define and provision these resources with their configuration and associated parameters declaratively in a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) template file, known as an Azure Resource Manager template.

  • Oksana Zybinskaya
  • April 25, 2016
  • 4 min to read

SanDisk X400 SSD Review

SanDisk is one of few companies currently offering 1TB of storage in a single-sided M.2 card – its product X400 SSD. X400 also comes in a 2.5″ 7mm-height form factor, but the M.2 configuration is the main selling point of this line. 1TB M.2 X400 card allows getting the most out of the ultra-thin notebooks in terms of storage, without sacrificing performance or battery life.

5 tips to help you explore the world of PowerShell scripting

In 2006 Windows Administrators got their first glimpse into what the world of PowerShell scripting might look like when PowerShell, which was then known as Monad was released under beta conditions to the world. 10 years later we are now into our 5th iteration of the scripting language and have seen a thriving ecosystem form around the Verb-Noun style of automation. PowerShell is a powerful tool and can be an amazing time-saver to for any Windows administrator to know. That said, as with any scripting/programming languages getting started can be a little daunting, especially if you have had no scripting experience to fall back on. Below we will take a look at 5 tips that can save you both time and energy when writing your PowerShell scripts.

Extend Active Directory to Microsoft Azure

Extend Active Directory to Microsoft Azure is a common scenario when you implement hybrid cloud. For example, protected VM with Azure Site Recovery may need access to Active Directory even if On-Premise datacenter is unreachable. You can also extend your Active Directory to Azure when you use production workloads in Azure VMs to avoid to implement a new forest or to avoid to use the VPN connection for all Active Directory workloads. In this topic, we will see how to extend the Active Directory to Microsoft Azure.

  • Oksana Zybinskaya
  • April 14, 2016
  • 2 min to read

OMS alerting is now generally available

Microsoft Operations Management Suite alerting has moved from preview mode to generally available status.