Chalk Mountain Services, a US oil and gas transportation and logistics provider, had a Microsoft Hyper-V environment with no shared storage and no reliability. The company was keen to create a highly available (HA) virtual server environment, thus providing faster resource control within its IT infrastructure. With StarWind, Chalk Mountain Services built a failover cluster and got the opportunity to cross VMs to other servers while maintaining HA for outages and not compromising on performance.

Find out how Chalk Mountain Services creates an HA virtual server environment satisfying budget restrictions and reliability requirements with StarWind.

VMware Customer Connect is definitely better than its predecessor, My VMware. The new Customer Connect portal is powered by a novel AI and machine learning for elevated user experience. It also allows you to manage user assets, licenses, teams and user rights, monitor infrastructure health, create support tickets and do a host of other things within a sleek new design.

Read the article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization pro, on what’s new in VMware Customer Connect and why you shouldn’t be missing out on using it.

Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates, an American company specializing in geotechnical and geostructural engineering, needed highly available IT infrastructure because of the constant risk of losing production due to hardware failure. To ensure the desired redundancy the company needed 2 SANs, but, after looking into numbers, though, the company decided to deploy an additional node. With StarWind HyperConverged Appliance deployment, the company increased data resiliency and ensured the highest possible production uptime with hardware fault tolerance (FT).

Find out how Hillis-Carnes Engineering Associates received a reliable highly available infrastructure with StarWind.

Medical Billing Resources, Inc. (MBR), an American medical billing services provider, had a pitfall in its IT infrastructure operation, namely out-of-date physical SAN that didn’t allow the company to upgrade to Windows Server 2019. The impossibility to upgrade and, as a result, the inability to fully enjoy all business opportunities led MBR to the virtualization market in search of virtual shared storage. With StarWind, the company creates a highly available Hyper-V environment and gets rid of an end-of-life SAN.

Find out how MBR saves over $10K and heads for business uprise with StarWind.

StarWind SAN & NAS official release build is finally here! VSAN’s core engine pre-packaged into a Linux-based VM that unleashes the full power of ZFS and allows repurposing existing hypervisor servers into HCL-certified high-performance storage appliances, shared storage, or backup targets, compatible with VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Veeam. User-favorite rapidly responsive StarWind Support and Assisted Migration included

Click on the link to learn more about StarWind SAN & NAS that marks a new era in virtualization and download the Trial Version to verify everything for yourself today!

Microsoft has recently added a new feature, which is the possibility to issue Kubernetes command-line interface (CLI) commands directly from Azure CLI. This is a serious step forward in the direction of further simplification of Azure workload and routine, which can be appreciated by Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS).

Read the new guide by Florent Appointare, a Microsoft Engineer, on how to start issuing Kubectl commands directly from your Azure CLI.

Previously, we discussed how Windows Server 2022 is continuing to push the QUIC networking transport protocol on top of UDP. In this article, we’ll focus on SMB storage protocol over QUIC, how it prevents server spoofing, how it’s integrated into the client and the server, how to prepare for its work, and other related topics.

Read Part 1 of the new article by Didier Van Hoye, a Microsoft MVP, on the benefits, and downsides of SMB over QUIC and how to prepare the certificate necessary for its work.

DESAN Research Solutions B.V., a Dutch market research company, had an iSCSI SAN infrastructure characterized by low performance, high maintenance costs, and extra points of failure. Constantly working with large amounts of customer data, the company needed a solution that would eliminate these issues, not for all the money in the world. With StarWind, DESAN Research Solutions B.V. enhances its IT infrastructure performance, blurs out the problem of extra points of failure, and gets a boost to accelerate data analysis and processing service.

Find out how the company builds a trustworthy IT infrastructure powered by StarWind, reducing OpEx impressively at the same time.

In Part 1 we focused on overall information on SMB over QUIC and how to make the necessary preparations for all to function well. Today, we’ll focus on the technicalities. It will be somewhat a tedious process but we’ve laid out everything in minute detail, so you don’t have to break your neck trying to figure it all out

Read Part 2 of the new article by Didier Van Hoye, a Microsoft MVP, which provides a step-by-step guide on how to properly configure SMB over QUIC for testing purposes.

Město Přeštice, a local self-government institution in the Czech Republic, was experiencing inadmissible performance issues with its outdated IT infrastructure. Due to a limited budget, it needed a flexible solution with great vendor support that would ensure constant uptime and fault tolerance without having to incur heavy expenses on new physical shared storage.

Find out how Město Přeštice was able to achieve all that and more with a simple 2-node SDS solution from StarWind.

Managing and ensuring the compliance of departments in your tenant is important to cybersecurity and smooth workflow. This is especially relevant for medium and large deployments. Combining Azure resources into groups and using Role-Based Access Management (RBAC) will reduce threats and increase work efficacy. Azure Policy can help enhance those processes further.

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Microsoft MVP, on how to use Azure Policy to allow certain resource types in resource groups to boost compliance and workflow.

File servers and hosted shares on Microsoft Windows have shares and permissions not necessarily known to everybody in the environment. With cybersecurity in mind, you'll sooner or later have to share and/or migrate files, folders, and user profiles. There is no one solution, but you can consider several to keep in mind when it comes to migration.

Read the new article by Vladan Seget of ESX Virtualization (vladan.fr) on file migrations and NTFS permissions with MSWS2019 Storage Migration, Xcopy, and Third-Party tools.

StarWind Virtual SAN is the first (and the only one, so far) Software-Defined Storage (SDS) that’s been certified with Microsoft Windows Server 2022! We are constantly working to evolve the user-favorite StarWind VSAN so that our customers enjoy the best and most modern SDS at the best pricing. Always ahead of the curve

Click on the link to see the WS2022 certification details for StarWind VSAN.

The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand faced problems with low performance and high downtime and needed to scale up their storage to fix them. They were looking for a cost-efficient software-defined storage (SDS) solution suitable for Hyper-V. The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand leveraged their environment with highly available storage infrastructure.

Find out how the EGAT solved its storage resource problem and increased their performance.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is incredibly multifaceted. For example, you can test the connectivity of an SQL server that’s using a private endpoint connection to your AKS cluster using a pod. You can even manage SQL databases without deploying a VM or installing SQL Server Management Studio or other software.

Read the new guide by Florent Appointare, a Microsoft Engineer, on how to use SQL Tools to manage databases and test connectivity between your SQL and AKS via a pod.

Azure Sentinel is growing in popularity when it comes to Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR). Not only does it inform you when an incident becomes true, but it also functions as a response system to address it. The software exists to significantly reduce Mean-Time-to-Response, tightening your security even more.

Read the article by Nicolas Prigent, a three-time Microsoft MVP, on using Azure Sentinel to significantly improve the cybersecurity of your production environment today.

Telent Technology Services Ltd, a British telecommunication company, had a single standalone CCTV application and 2 database servers located at the primary and backup sites. There was a glitch in CCTV systems due to a mismatch configuration of the servers and no seamless failover. With StarWind, Telent Technology Services Ltd ensures centralized configuration management of its London CCTV systems and seamless multi-site failover.

Find out how Telent Technology Services Ltd propels its CCTV systems operations security to new heights without additional hardware costs with StarWind

StarWind SAN & NAS, our new software-defined storage (SDS), pools your existing storage resources into HCL-certified shared storage connected to your virtual infrastructure. Leveraging Linux, ZFS, and StarWind VSAN engine, it lifts scalability restrictions, as well as allows you to save up on costly vSphere HA and Windows licensing.

Check out the new video guide by Vladan Seget of ESX Virtualization (vladan.fr) on the benefits of StarWind SAN & NAS and how to properly install and configure the solution.

Network Policy Server (NPS) Extension for Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a good choice to enhance the security of your Remote Desktop (RD) Gateway. This combination will use two-step verification for client authentication to add another protection layer to your NPS/RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Server).

Read Part 1 of the new article by Didier Van Hoye, a Microsoft MVP, on how to prepare your existing highly available (HA) RD Gateway for using NPS Extension for Azure MFA.

In Part 1, we talked about the security principle of two-factor authentication and how to prepare your existing Remote Desktop (RD) Gateway for Network Policy Server (NPS) Extension for Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Now, it’s time to integrate the solution and look at the logs and tools for troubleshooting in case any issues occur.

Read Part 2 of the new article by Didier Van Hoye, a Microsoft MVP, on how to install and configure NPS Extension for Azure MFA for your existing HA RD Gateway.