If you are a VMware vSphere administrator who wants to solve the problem of a low network throughput, Network I/O Control (NIOC) is exactly what you need! It’s a traffic-specific vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) mechanism of network bandwidth regulation that was firstly introduced in vSphere 4.1 in 2010. NIOC appeared when 10G networking was increasingly prevalent and became a real breakthrough. With this mechanism, you can ensure high network throughput and go with fewer network adapters in ESXi hosts. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Read the article by Alex Samoylenko, a Virtualization technology professional, to find out how to configure NIOC.

It is never superfluous to provide an extra level of protection for your data and privacy in management. The Microsoft platform allows users to register and manage their applications, have a set of identifiers, and access their data 24/7. Creating a user with Azure Function will allow you to secure your data and provide private access to applications. Ensure information privacy right now!

Read the article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer, to find out how to automate the user creation with Azure Function.

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.

There are many anti-spam tools. And they are pretty good. For example, better-known and reliable domains can be added to your whitelist. However, spoofed emails will always be redone because they represent legitimate business emails. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is a mechanism that will protect your email box and will allow you to get rid of annoying spam, ensuring verification of the sender's domain. Stop spam emails right now!

Read the article by Gary Williams, a virtualization, storage, and Windows systems administrator, to find out how to configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC anti-spam solutions.

Johnson’s Construction Limited, a Canadian company dealing with the Heavy Civil Construction, had a single point of failure in their existing IT infrastructure which could be catastrophic. Although Microsoft Server 2012 R2 allowed to have failover cluster for the Hyper-V VMs, it did not support failover for the file server which hosted the Hyper-V disks.

Learn from this case study how Johnson’s Construction Ltd. eliminated downtime and turned the entire system into the highly available (HA) cluster with StarWind.

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.

GCL Diesel, a Canadian diesel service and diesel part distribution company, had non-redundant Windows 2003 servers and needed to optimize its existing IT infrastructure to eliminate downtime. The company first considered physical SAN. However, it did not fit the strict budget constraints.

Learn from this success story how StarWind allowed the company to build a fault-tolerant system without breaking budgets.

StarWind takes the stage as a Silver Sponsor at the UK VMUG UserCon 2018 held on December 13 in Leicester, UK. VMUG UserCons are created by VMware users for VMware user to discuss the latest developments in virtualization technologies. At this conference, StarWind will present a new way of improving the performance of the traditional iSCSI protocol – iSCSI Accelerator. Feel more enthusiastic about NVMes? Meet our NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) – the protocol tailored to squeeze maximum NVMe disks’ performance!

Visit the event to learn how to vanish the latency across your storage infrastructure! Find out more about this conference at the link.

In order to build your own Hyper-V lab in Azure, you need two Hyper-V instances. But, hey, why do we need Hyper-V Replica here? This technology allows you to shift a virtual machine from a server on-prem to Microsoft Azure for maxing out your services uptime. With Hyper-V Replica, returning your services back to the normal functioning becomes a matter of only a few seconds… Looks like a must-have for your Hyper-V environment, doesn’t it?

Read the article by Nicolas Prigent, a System Engineer, to find out how to configure Hyper-V Replica in Azure.

StarWind takes the stage as a Silver Sponsor at the UK VMUG UserCon 2018 held on December 13 in Leicester, UK. VMUG UserCons are created by VMware users for VMware user to discuss the latest developments in virtualization technologies. At this conference, StarWind will present a new way of improving the performance of the traditional iSCSI protocol – iSCSI Accelerator. Feel more enthusiastic about NVMes? Meet our NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) – the protocol tailored to squeeze maximum NVMe disks’ performance!

Visit the event to learn how to vanish the latency across your storage infrastructure! Find out more about this conference at the link.

StarWind takes the floor at NVMe Developer Days held December 6 at the Hilton Bayfront San Diego. The NVMe Developer Days program gives developers a chance to discuss the current state of NVMe and share ideas on how to broaden its applications.

At this conference, StarWind presents NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) – the protocol tailored to unleash the full NVMe performance in any environment. The result is far better than what storage systems can achieve over such legacy storage protocols as iSCSI, iSER, and Fibre Channel.

Greet StarWind with open arms at NVMe Developer Days on December 6 from 3:30 to 4:45 pm at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront!

Find out more about this conference!

StarWind takes the floor at NVMe Developer Days held December 6 at the Hilton Bayfront San Diego. The NVMe Developer Days program gives developers a chance to discuss the current state of NVMe and share ideas on how to broaden its applications.

At this conference, StarWind presents NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) – the protocol tailored to unleash the full NVMe performance in any environment. The result is far better than what storage systems can achieve over such legacy storage protocols as iSCSI, iSER, and Fibre Channel.

Greet StarWind with open arms at NVMe Developer Days on December 6 from 3:30 to 4:45 pm at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront!

Find out more about this conference!

If you work with Azure close enough, you’ve probably have heard of Nested Virtualization. Yes, it is the feature allowing you to run Hyper-V inside an Azure VM. Why does one need that thing? Well, to build a perfect lab for demos, development, testing, whatever… without buying any extra hardware!

Read the article by Nicolas Prigent, a System Engineer, to find out how to deploy Hyper-V in Azure.

Connect it Networks, an innovative Canadian company providing premium quality communications solutions, had issues with their aging IT infrastructure performance and scalability. The servers they had were sufficient and well taken care of. But, with what they had, they could not use the whole scope of computing resources. Besides, it wasn’t that simple to upgrade. StarWind software-defined storage stack helped them make the best use of what they already had improving ROI overall.

Find out how Connect it Networks achieves better server hardware ROI with StarWind.

Schneider, a U.S. packaging machinery manufacturer had physical Dell servers that raised issues with heat level and maintenance costs. The company implements storage virtualization instead of purchasing a physical SAN. It chooses StarWind and consequently gets high performance and high availability with reduced IT TCO.

Find out how Schneider keeps IT costs low with virtualization stack provided by StarWind.

One, two, three ... Let's roll! StarWind presents an updated functionality of V2V Converter. The utility enables conversion of a physical machine into a virtual one (P2V) and other way around. For example, you have a server with Windows Server 2012R2 installed running some critical application. With physical-to-virtual (P2V) entire host or specific physical drive (or volume) can be migrated. What else? The pressure is on! Now your VMs can be migrated directly between Hyper-V and ESXi (and backwards). Moreover, StarWind V2V Converter offers bi-directional conversion between all the major VM formats: VMDK, VHD/VHDX (Windows Repair Mode aware), QCOW2, and StarWind native IMG.

Read the article by Alex Bykovskyi, StarWind Solutions Architect, to find out how to speed the process of hypervisor switch with StarWind V2V Converter and learn more about the P2V option.

Do you use VMware but don’t know how to guarantee the data safety, allow the virtual machines migration, enable continuous application availability, and eliminate any single point of failure within your IT environment? Consider taking advantage of the combination of VMware and Linux-based StarWind VSAN. VMware high availability (HA) ensures constant VMs operation, while StarWind is responsible for the storage fault tolerance.

Learn from the video how to configure high availability (HA) and fault tolerance (FT) VMware environment.

Innitec used to run tape-centric backup environment for years. There is actually nothing wrong with the physical tapes. But increasing data volumes caused a discrepancy. Storage became inefficient. Intervention was necessary. Virtualization technologies in the form of StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) became a rescuer in the case.

Find out how Innitec attained simple management of backup environment with no changes and extra expenses on new hardware and licensing.

BLDD Architects, a U.S. company operating in the field of architectural and structural design, had aging EMC SAN infrastructure with VMware on top. Such an architecture entailed issues with poor performance, the difficulty of maintenance, and high financial costs. In this case, the viability of the IT infrastructure is out of the question. StarWind software-defined storage stack allowed to create maintenance-friendly and high-performance IT infrastructure.

Find out how BLDD Architects ensured the balanced and long-term development of its business processes with StarWind.