Are you a Windows Infrastructure Administrator and looking for the best option of managing Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) that will tick all the boxes? We’ll help you slice and dice this question with a detailed analysis of Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT), PowerShell, 5nine, Windows Admin Center (WAC), and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Eliminate all malfunctions and fortify server workloads with a WSFC management option that satisfies all your requirements!

Learn from the upcoming free webinar about different WSFC management solutions, pros and cons of each, and choose the best for you.

After rolling out Windows Server 2019 and Windows Admin Center a month ago, Microsoft said that both were designed with ongoing popularity of all-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments in mind. This being said, let’s talk about the new multifunctional Azure Network Adapter! As you know, large workloads require good connections to VMs in Azure. This can be accomplished by using things like Site-to-Site VPN, Azure Express Route, or Point-to-Site VPN. Here, Azure Network Adapter comes into the play, allowing to connect VMs to the Azure Virtual Network just in one (or two) clicks!

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to find out how to configure the Azure Network Adapter and connect your On-Prem physical or virtual server to the Azure Virtual Network.

IT administrators are always confronted with the problem of building innovative, fast, modern, and reliable IT infrastructure that fits the budget and saves resources for future growth. To commence, you should plan, select, re-plan, clarify goals, and so on ad infinitum in a vicious circle. However, the issue of guaranteeing the data safety will always be relevant on the agenda. Choosing a SAN (Storage Area Network) with the iSCSI protocol as one of the possible storage solutions will ensure data security and constant availability. In addition, this approach is cost-effective in terms of maintenance and support.

Read the article by Michael Rakitin, StarWind Post-Sales Support Team Lead, to find out the best practices of building iSCSI SAN.

A reverse proxy is a service that sits in front of one or more servers and accepts requests from clients for resources that are located on the server or servers. From a client point of view, a reverse proxy looks like a web server and can be easily used for remote access.
The Kemp LoadMaster platform provides reverse proxy services that expand the range of workloads and provide access to dozens of web applications via a single IP address/port. Set up a reverse proxy server on the LoadMaster and get the perfect point in the network to control traffic and optimize performance!

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to find out how to configure a reverse proxy manually!

Let's imagine a situation: a power outage went out and an incorrect server shutdown has occurred. Everything is aggravated by the fact that you have no power backup. What will happen to your write operations? They sink into oblivion and data will be lost. But StarWind says “no” to these troubles! Log-structured Write-Back Cache (LWC) is a StarWind feature which speeds up the processing of write requests and saves data when the server is incorrectly shut down. What about RAM caching? Your data also will be saved.

Read the article by Boris Yurchenko, StarWind Tech Support Engineer, to find out how to configure StarWind Log-structured Write-Back Cache.

Lipman Insurance Administrators Inc., a U.S. company specializing in employee benefits administration, had a mixed Windows/Unix environment with dedicated servers and clusters of servers for each business application with Microsoft Hyper-V on top. Such an infrastructure provided for a multitude of hardware items and expensive support contracts with very little data redundancy. What kind of infrastructure do we have in the end? Time-consuming, inefficient, costly, problematic, and complicated. StarWind became a game-changer and allowed creating a high-performing, high-functional, fault-tolerant, highly available, reliable, and easy-to-use environment.

Find out how Lipman Insurance Administrators achieved IT infrastructure optimization with StarWind.

A person of today should be fair-minded and free from bias in any situation. The tech community is no exception. How can you choose the right soft- or hardware? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the product? IT Central Station is an online platform that offers current, objective, and relevant user information and helps in choosing the best technical solution. Do you doubt what to give preference: StarWind Virtual SAN or VMware vSAN?

Determine the winner by yourself after reading reviews about two VSAN solutions at the following link.

Windows Admin Center offers a great web interface for managing Windows Server. Microsoft's desire to bring the capabilities of the hybrid cloud to on-premises systems has led to the inclusion of the Azure Backup feature in Windows Admin Center. Now you can configure Azure Backup for your Windows Server with just a few clicks and save your time and resources. This is especially suitable for those who have a small environment in a data center. Or maybe it is hosted by another service provider, where having your own backup infrastructure does not make much sense.

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to find out how to configure Azure Backup from Windows Admin Center at the following link.

Siemens Parcel & Airport Logistics Private Limited, a logistics solutions provider, used physical SAN as part of their IT infrastructure serving their customers. A physical SAN was very expensive to maintain and entailed the problem of hardware clutter. StarWind eliminated any need in physical shared storage and ensured high availability (HA) of the company’s IT infrastructure without breaking its budget.

Learn from this success story how Siemens Postal, Parcel & Airport Logistics Private Limited got a properly sized IT environment and reduced IT operational costs with StarWind.

The new VMware vSAN version will be released in beta in Q1/Q2 this year, but VMware has “sneak peeked” many details about the upcoming vSAN version features. What new technologies will appear in the new version of VMware vSAN? VMware tailored vSAN for all-cloud environments, introducing vSAN Native Data Protection, Linked Clone, First Class Disk (FCD) support, and other added functionality. Do you want to know more?

Read the article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization technology professional, to find out about new features in the upcoming VMware vSAN version at the following link.

"Object with reference <vmname> was not found in the hierarchy cache." Have you ever met such an error message during replacing the vCenter Server configured in Veeam Backup & Replication? Or maybe in the case of an inventory change in the vCenter? A similar message pops up when a Virtual Machine's MoRef changes. To complete backup jobs successfully, you need to re-map the MoRef ID of protected VMs, namely to keep same MoRef IDs for all protected virtual machines. How should that be done?

Read the article by Paolo Valsecchi, a System Engineer, to find out how to remap MoRef ID of protected VMs, avoid backup jobs failure, and replace the vCenter Server safely.

In public could hosting, whether it is Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, you deal with security credentials. For every business, securing data, protecting information, or delegating access are vital. Identity Access Management (IAM) is a framework that helps to distribute access policies and account protection, and it can serve your needs specifically. Learn what exactly it is and why you should care!

Read the article by Gary Williams, a systems administrator, to find out why IAM matters and why you should use it.

VM tools and VM hardware compatibility are vital for your VMs to run, but before updating it, you better be sure you need the features an upgrade can offer. Otherwise, it is a pig in a poke. VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1 (U1) sounds familiar? In that case, you will be interested in finding out what you can do with VMware Update Manager (VUM).

Read the article by Vladan Seget, an IT and Virtualization consultant, to find out how to update VM hardware compatibility via vSphere Update Manager (VUM).

Application virtualization services, despite a lot of benefits, are not always able to rival SaaS platforms. Or at least, it used to be the case before the public preview of Windows Virtual Desktop. The latter is a desktop and app virtualization service employing simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, Office 365 ProPlus optimization, and RDS environments support. Learn how to utilize this novelty in a few clicks!

Read the article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer, to find out how to use Windows Virtual Desktop with Azure Tenant.

A botnet, DDOS attacks, phishing scam are entering the real world with the fast path, carrying a real threat to your data. How to make yourself secure? Azure Bastion is one way to protect your strategic and critical assets from cyber risks. It allows you to have private and fully managed RDP and SSH access to your Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). How to deploy it in your environment?
Read the article by Nicolas Prigent, a System Engineer, to find out how to create an Azure Bastion host.

The USS Midway Museum had 4-node Hyper-V failover cluster with Windows Server 2012. The organization wanted to create shared storage using commodity hardware. However, storage vendors charged exorbitant prices for outdated methods of SAN storage maintenance and imposed unprofitable support plans. With StarWind, the USS Midway Museum received shared storage that can be easily deployed on the existing commodity hardware without additional support costs.

Find out how the USS Midway Museum received such a desired high availability (HA) for its applications and saved more than $80,000 on hardware and software expenses with StarWind.

NVMe is quite a promising technology, but there’s something wrong with its perception: admins are not going as crazy about it as vendors. Using legacy protocols, applications cannot get most of PCIe flash performance, meaning that we do not get the performance we paid for.

NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is a protocol tailored for PCIe SSDs, but there is no NVMe-oF initiator for Windows.

StarWind is excited to present one! It is the first free all-software NVMe-oF initiator for Windows that proved its efficiency by helping us to set the HCI industry speed record.

Find out more about StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator

If you have already tried out a test environment deployment on Azure with Terraform, you may have found it eligible, albeit slightly insecure. However, the latter problem exists only in case you won't fix it with storing your password in Azure Key Vault!

Read the article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer, to find out how protect your password with Azure Key Vault while running test environment via Terraform.

As a software-defined virtualized environment, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is gaining more and more popularity each year, offering new possibilities and benefits to users, outshining traditional architectures. In such circumstances of growing competition, the fact that StarWind HCA continues to gain recognition as one of the few best HCI systems is clearly speaking for itself! Find out more.

A unique position of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) grants both advantages and disadvantages. Initially, it is not efficient for such business to deploy resource-hungry and overwhelmingly extended infrastructure, which turns out to be too costly. However, on the other hand, StarWind helps to solve issues such as significant application downtime, old hardware, diverse power cycling, ransomware vulnerability, and inefficient backup solutions with building an IT environment ideally suited for each separate case at a reasonable cost.

Read our rubric Other to learn how exactly we can help you or find out how your problem can be solved.