There’s no IT administrator who likes finding out his environment is down or even worth – getting it from the end users. In this webinar, we’ll show you how to achieve the highest uptime possible for your environment with smallest personal time contributed using basic monitoring and alerting tools. But what is more important, we’ll tell you how you can get a true peace of mind and free yourself from the burden of constant environment monitoring and issue resolution with StarWind ProActive Support.

Join our Live Tap Room and learn how you can easily solve your IT infrastructure support pain with StarWind.
Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-proactive-support-is-a-remedy-to-it-infrastructure-support-pain

When it comes to upgrading VMware vSphere, there are various approaches to do that on your ESXi hosts. Some methods are more simple while other offer more advantages when upgrading at scale, and some are more prone to user error. In this post, we’ll take a look at each option and discuss its benefits and drawbacks.

Read the full article by Mike Preston, Toronto VMUG Co-Leader and vExpert, to learn more about different options for upgrading VMware ESXi hosts.

There have been a lot of high profile security breaches this year, including those at Equifax, Deloitte, and Disqus. Sure, once it was made clear how the breach occurred, a lot was said about how bad it is that the breaches accorded and how they should have been avoided. This is quite valid from a technical standpoint but, the reasons that these security issues were allowed to exist also depend on human factors.

Read the full article by Gary Williams, a virtualization, storage and Windows systems administrator, to learn how human factors can cause security breaches.

First SMB-friendly HyperConverged vendor StarWind runs free webinar, partnered with its exclusive Europe distributor Hammer.

At this webinar, you’ll learn about the features and functionality of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance – a turnkey virtualization infrastructure building block delivering ultimate performance and operational simplicity.

Join us on December 14 and win Apple Watch Series 3!

Register now: http://www.hammer-europe.com/en/everything-else/events/starwind-hca-and-roadmap-update

StarWind Virtual SAN provides VMs with virtual shared storage by mirroring the internal resources between the configured cluster nodes. In this way, the mirrored storage is treated just as local by both hypervisors and clustered applications, eliminating any need for physical shared storage. When you consider upgrading StarWind Virtual SAN to a newer version, you should follow a specific upgrade sequence and procedure to ensure that everything goes smoothly and without any service downtime.

Read the full article by Paolo Valsecchi, a System Engineer, VCP-DCV, vExpert, VMCE, Veeam Vanguard, and PernixPro, to learn how to properly upgrade StarWind Virtual SAN.

Microsoft Intune is a service allowing to manage the mobility of your IT environment, including mobile devices and laptops. All you need to do is enroll the users’ devices in Intune and you're good to go: deploy new apps, set their protection policies or monitor all your applications on devices where users use Intune.

Read the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies, to learn how to work with Microsoft Intune.

Nowadays, IT administrators should be able to keep a finger on the pulse of their environment 24/7 no matter where they are. To achieve this, StarWind has added Web-based management functionality allowing to access your StarWind-based infrastructure from any remote location and from any device with an HTML5-capable web browser. All you need to do is deploy StarWind Gateway VM or StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance, and you get the full control over the storage-related operations.

Read the full article to learn how to deploy StarWind Gateway VM and get a remote access to your StarWind infrastructure.

Need to manage your IT infrastructure remotely? No problem, StarWind provides Web-based management functionality allowing you to access your StarWind environment from any point of the world using any device with an HTML5-capable web browser. In this part, we’ll describe how to get the full control over the storage-related operations from any remote location by deploying StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance.

Read the full article to learn how to manage your StarWind-based infrastructure remotely using StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance.

We all clearly understand that underlying storage performance determines how fast your mission-critical applications can go. So, Intel SSD DC P3700 provides the highest performance out of all Intel NVMe Data Center-focused product line, sure with a proper SCSI controller. In this article, we’ll try to find the SCSI controller that ensures the highest throughput, lowest latency, and a minimal processing cost, allowing our NVMe drive to show its best.

Read the full article by Dmytro Khomenko, a Pre-Sales Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to drive Intel SSD DC P3700 performance to the max.

One of the initial questions any system administrator would think of is something like “Do I really need deduplication?”. In fact, the answer depends on particular environment peculiarities. To figure out how much resources you save, StarWind offers a great freeware tool – StarWind Deduplication analyzer.

To learn more, read the full article by Boris Yurchenko, a Tech Support Engineer at StarWind.

That’s cool to manage storage systems from whatever vendor in more or less the same way, isn’t it? That’s, actually, what you can do using SCVMM through Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S). Once configured properly, SMI-S becomes a handy tool for convenient orchestrating storage ecosystem.

Learn from the article written by Ivan Ischenko, a Technical Support Engineer here at StarWind, how to dramatically simplify storage management by using Microsoft System Center VMM through SMI-S.

While managing large environments, it seems nice to reuse the already existing in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) security groups for control over VMware vCenter. At that point, joining VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) to the Active Directory seems a good idea. 
This solution provides the existing domain users with centralized management over VMware vSphere environment without creating the new ones manually.
Find out how to join VCSA to Microsoft AD for centralized VCSA domain users’ management.

Just a few days ago, StarWind introduced Virtual Tape Library at Storage Field Day 15. This new backup storage solution ensures higher security and cost-efficiency for backup data thanks to cloud storage support. Provides flexible scaling for local storage due to object storage support and ensures there are zero issues since it goes backed by ProActive Support.

Watch StarWind presentation at Storage Field Day 15!

One day, any IT environment grows. Then, it becomes your storage admin’s mission to grant all your colleagues’ data availability in all locations. That sounds like your work is to become more hectic, right? Fortunately, we know the way around!

Learn from our upcoming free webinar how building Hyper-V or vSphere stretched cluster comes in handy.

That’s kinda of a black box for these guys that contains log files, diagnostic information, and performance metrics which together provide them with the insight into what’s going on with your environment.
Find out more about retrieving a support bundle in the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization technology professional.

Setting up Live-Migration only for a couple of nodes in Hyper-V cluster is not rocket science. Sure, it requires some time, but nothing more than that. Still, in large environments, where you have, let’s say, 40 or even more nodes, configuring Live Migration manually looks like torture. Fortunately, we know a way around!

Read the full article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to find out how to set up Live-Migration in Hyper-V clusters faster and easier.

This article finalizes the trilogy about building a Highly Available (HA) and Fault-Tolerant (FT) production environment with Microsoft Windows Server 2016. Putting the long story short, two previous articles covered on installing Windows Server 2016 Core on a single server and adding shared storage for VMs. Though all storage admins know that two nodes are much better than one, so we cannot leave a single node! The final solution must be redundant. That, actually, is why we need Failover Cluster Role to be added.

Read the full article by Alex Khorolets, a technical support engineer at StarWind, to learn how to deploy the Failover Clustering role.

Using Microsoft Azure for whatever purpose (be it extending production, or gaining some extra storage), is usually believed to be cheaper compared to buying new hardware. Still, without careful control, expenditures on the cloud may cost you pretty penny!

Find out in the recent article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies, how to control your spending on Azure.

The previous article from this series shed light on SMB Direct and why you need it. Regarding the features RDMA brings to SMB Direct, it deserves a separate article! So, this part covers which flavors of RDMA are available for use with SMB Direct.

Read the full article by Didier Van Hoye, an experienced subject matter expert advisor and infrastructure architect, to learn more the role RDMA plays in SMB Direct.

Regarding the growing demand on the cloud, it’s no problem finding a cloud storage provider. However, there are only few market players that can be considered true leaders of this industry. Amazon is one of these guys, with S3 cloud storage serving a perfect fit for any business regardless of its size. But still, even Amazon’s customers face several challenges during data migration process to S3, especially, when it comes to petabytes.

Read the full article by Sergey Sanduliak, a Technical Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn about 5 awesome solutions that make data migration to AWS easier.