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!
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.
Being a system admin, you’d prefer to have more boring stuff done without your involvement, right? A thing you’d love to automate is updating Microsoft Failover Cluster. Thanks to Cluster Aware Updating, that can be done easily without any downtime.
Read the full article by Paulsen Muzari, a Technical Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn how to update Failover Cluster automatically without any downtime.
As you probably know, you can orchestrate your vSphere environment with either Command Line Interface or Graphic User Interface. The former grants you more freedom, while the later is pretty much intuitive. They both seem great, but which one should you pick to manage your IT ecosystem efficiently?
Read the full article by Andrea Mauro, a virtualization expert and architect, to learn more about peculiarities of managing vSphere with Command Line Interface and Graphic User Interface.
Today, FeaturedCustomers released their software customer success report on hyper-converged solutions. There, they highlighted the top-rated vendors designing hyper-converged solutions. StarWind is referred as a Rising Star, a vendor that has the disruptive technology and understands trends in the market. Thank you for your support, we keep on going!
Have a look: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2018/03/prweb15309124.htm
Sometimes, small changes in your IT environment may turn out to be fruitful for your production. For instance, a proper network protocol allows you to squeeze extra CPU for your production VMware VMs so that you can run more of them. Under a “proper protocol” we mean here iSER, the protocol that allows offloading I/O to RDMA hardware and may be viewed as an alternative to iSCSI.
Learn from this video how to streamline CPU utilization with iSER.
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.
StarWind team will take the floor at Storage Field Day 15 to reveal new awesome backup storage technologies: Virtual Tape Library with Cloud and Object storage and backed by ProActive Support! Our speaking slot is the first in line: March 9, 8-10 am PT, don’t miss it!
For Livestream, go to https://www.facebook.com/TechFieldDay/ or watch on http://techfieldday.com/, Livestream.com - includes the entire event.
For generations, NFS has been viewed either as a corporate file server (Surprise! Credit goes to NetApp for sure!) or just as an easy way to land users’ files from any Windows, MacOS X or UNIX / Linux box right on a remote server using Ethernet connectivity. However, starting with NFS v3 the protocol itself can do much more than that!
Thanks to its more than recent performance, elegant access management and individual file locking abilities, now we can use NFS as a shared storage for whatever hypervisor we want (Well, except Microsoft Hyper-V of course, but that’s another story to tell…), be it Linux-based KVM or proprietary ESXi at all. Since 2003 or so Microsoft was kind enough to include NFS server into standard Windows Server distribution free of charge.
While it’s definitely not the best NFS server implementation on Earth, sometimes it comes handy when you already have Windows Server up & running and don’t want (or don’t have time…) to provide any new FreeBSD or Linux installation “from scratch”: within your existing Windows enabling NFS server is as easy as just ticking the checkbox!
Read the full article written by Ivan Ischenko a Technical Support Engineer here at StarWind to learn how to run VMware vSphere & ESXi VMs right from the Windows provided NFS share.
Any storage admin understands clearly that underlying storage determines how fast mission-critical applications can run. Obviously, to max it out, you need disks performing at near-to-lightning speed and configure a proper SCSI controller. Let’s say, you’ll build your storage with NVMes, or just add them to the existing one, but what controller will you choose?
Watch our upcoming webinar to learn how to choose the appropriate SCSI controller, allowing to push your NVMe performance to the limit!
Create a continuous namespace combining flash (SSD, NVMe etc) and spinning disk, instead of manually copying your data from disk to flash and back. Get close to all-flash-array I/O performance with your workload and without breaking the bank. Leave tiering and data management to smart algorithms and AI and focus on something else.
Read the full article by Dmytro Khomenko, a Pre-Sales Engineer at StarWind, to learn more about the benefits of storage tiering.
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.
In fact, connecting iSCSI targets in Microsoft environment is not rocket science, but requires time and efforts. First, you are to add target discovery portals (a dozen of clicks), then proceed with connecting the targets (numerous clicks again)… and you need to repeat these operations again and again! Sounds not that good, right? Fortunately, this annoying procedure can be automated.
Read the full article by Boris Yurchenko, a Support Engineer at StarWind, to find out how to automate Windows iSCSI connection.
How to create developer and test environments in minutes with Azure DevTest LabsAzure DevTest Labs is a service that helps developers and testers quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. The only thing to do is to configure Azure DevTest Labs to allow developers deploy only a specific version of SQL Server which is called a VM image. When they need a new VM image, you simply add this image to the Lab and it’s over! The Developers are autonomous and can create their own servers without interacting with the production environment.
Read the full article by Nicolas Prigent, a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management, to learn how to use Azure DevTest Labs.
OK, so you’re a VMware administrator looking to free your CPU resources to run more VMs in your environment. No problem, this can be effectively achieved by offloading network I/O to RDMA hardware. So what should you do? Just replace iSCSI with iSER. In this way, data will be transferred directly from the application memory to the network adapter, avoiding few additional network layers and remarkably lowering system’s CPU utilization, allowing to increase VM density.
Join this webinar and learn how to increase your VMware VM density!
Storage tiering allows ensuring maximum storage utilization efficiency while also improving its performance. What is more, by combining StarWind Virtual SAN with tiered Microsoft Storage Spaces, you ensure the high level of redundancy and fault tolerance for your data.
Learn how to ensure your data high availability with StarWind Virtual SAN tiered storage.
Migrating on-premises VHD files to Microsoft Azure may be quite a headache for system administrators. The remedy to this problem lies in PowerShell and Azure Portal. Simple as that! Using some PowerShell commands and Azure Portal functionality, you can accomplish that task as “1-2-3”.
Read the full article by Nicolas Prigent, a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management, to learn how to migrate your VHD file to Azure easily.
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.
Achieve unrivalled performance with StarWind Fractal SAN powered by Mellanox. Recently, StarWind has released its Enterprise Storage Appliance, codename Fractal SAN. Running on top of Ceph and being powered by Mellanox, this solution ensures unmatched performance and resiliency.
Watch this video and gain insight in Mellanox and StarWind joint solution.
Why choose either private or public cloud if you can use benefits of them both? That, actually, is what StarWind achieves with its recent solution, StarWind Hybrid Cloud. It allows complementing your on-premises IT infrastructure with any public cloud, be it Azure, AWS, or GoogleCloudPlatform. Now, you can scale compute and storage resources whenever you want by means of the public cloud instead of buying new hardware. StarWind Hybrid Cloud keeps your data highly available and secure by providing active-active data replication between on-premises and public cloud.
Learn about StarWind Hybrid Cloud, the solution combining the best of private and public clouds.
