Hello, All!

We are glad to announce that we are releasing our new free software product very soon.

The new product is developed as a flexible and customizable web-based platform which will allow users get the full control over their IT infrastructures from a single HTML5 graphical interface.

The upcoming release will come as a preview version that covers essential monitoring features:

Server Monitoring

This feature allows monitoring stand-alone Windows Servers. The software collects and displays the performance and health data from the local infrastructure, simplifying the daily work of System Administrators.

Monitoring for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

The software allows monitoring the S2D infrastructure within a single web-based interface. It provides all the necessary information and metrics in a very convenient way. System Administrators would no longer need switching between the PowerShell, Server Manager, and Failover Cluster Manager to get the required information or check the S2D cluster health.

The future product roadmap includes:

Management for StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, and Ceph.

Choose what’s under the hood. Depending on the architecture requirements, available hardware, and other factors, one solution may be better than others. System Administrators will be able to select between StarWind Virtual SAN, Storage Spaces Direct, and Ceph to easily deploy, configure and maintain the best-fitting HA solution for their IT infrastructure.

Monitoring and management for Microsoft Hyper-V and Failover Cluster.

The product will not only allow users to monitor and manage the storage stack but also get the full control over the hypervisor and clustering from the web interface. For example, Administrators will be able to create new clusters, add nodes to the existing ones, deploy virtual machines, and configure networks.

Monitoring and management for 3rd party storage providers.

The product will support most popular and up-to-date management protocols ( Swordfish, WMI, VASA), that will allow a seamless integration into the existing IT infrastructure regardless of hardware or software utilized by a storage provider.
With that said, we are asking you, our Spiceworks friends, for a little favor. Please, find a minute of your time to participate in this tiny poll helping us to pick the better name for our product.

Currently, we are deciding among three names:

"StarWind Cloud Manager" - this name stands for our product's ability to manage the private cloud.
"StarWind Datacenter Manager" - well, obviously, large-sized deployments could be also managed by our new product
"StarWind FreeMan" - this was the internal name of the product used by our Development and Engineering teams, which stands for: "Free Manager".

The actual Poll is here @ SW https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2010251-help-starwind-to-pick-the-name-for-the-upcoming-product

Also, feel free to post your product name ideas.

Your feedback is very important to us and much appreciated!

P.S. Just a little insight to nourish your curiosity

vCenter High Availability is a new feature introduced in VMware vSphere 6.5 allowing to deploy a highly available VMware vCenter Server cluster. The feature provides automatic failover between the Active and Passive nodes and delivers an RTO of about 5 minutes, greatly reducing the impact of host, hardware and application failures.

Learn how to set up vCenter HA to add more redundancy to your IT infrastructure.

Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/add-more-redundancy-to-your-it-infrastructure-with-vcenter-ha

Many IT administrators run their homelabs to test latest technologies and increase their skills. Unfortunately, the main problem here is the lack of RAM. This is the case with VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 as its minimal deployment option requires 10Gb of RAM. However, it can be lowered by decreasing VMware VCSA memory size or by disabling services that are rarely used in your environment.

Read the full article by Vladan Seget, IT and virtualization consultant to learn how to configure VMware VCSA 6.5 to fit your homelab environment.

Virtual Volumes (VVols) is a new storage integration and management framework in VMware vSphere, allowing virtualization environments to offload storage management operations to the storage layer. In order to deliver seamless and efficient virtualization experience, StarWind has integrated the VVols support into its products, providing the ability to provision the virtual machine with the storage that fully meets its performance requirements.

Read the full article by Dmytro Malynka, a Solutions Architect at StarWind to learn how to configure and implement StarWind VVols in VMware vSphere environment.

Tape is becoming a legacy backup technology in a modern world of automation and cloud storage. Tape-based backup infrastructures face significant pitfalls as well as considerable hidden costs. Additional staff is needed to maintain tape-based infrastructures while moving tapes to off-site vaults creates additional expenses. StarWind Cloud VTL for AWS and Veeam delivers completely automated backup process, flexible scaling options together with replication and tiering to cost-efficient Amazon S3 and Glacier cloud storage.

Learn how to build fast, flexible and automated backup infrastructure with StartWind Cloud VTL for AWS and Veeam
Watch on-demand webinar: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-cloud-vtl-for-aws-and-veeam-redefining-tape-backup-for-the-cloud-era

VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) is an integration and management framework which creates a VM-centric infrastructure, where a VM and its disks become a unit of storage management for a storage system. It delivers agile storage consumption for virtual machines and provides finer control over the storage resources, allowing to provision storage according to the VM needs in a simple and dynamic way.

Learn how to build a virtualization infrastructure with VMware VVols and StarWind.

Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/how-to-easily-create-virtualization-infrastructure-with-vmware-vvols-and-starwind

To get the precise and correct picture of your storage performance, several factors must be considered, such as system's speed and capacity, processing power, network bandwidth and disks. Therefore, the most important indicators for proper storage benchmark are the number of IOPS, latency and network throughput. StarWind Storage Test tool provides a detailed information on these characteristics and allows comparing your local storage and highly available shared storage performance.

Learn how to properly measure your storage performance using StarWind Storage Test tool.

Watch the video: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/compare-the-performance-of-your-local-storage-and-starwind-highly-available-shared-storage

StarWind Grid Architecture allows building a highly fault-tolerant cluster capable of withstanding multiple nodes failure by interconnecting the nodes together into a single and resilient grid. Such cluster topology maintains the principle of data locality, where VMs receive the shortest way to the storage, delivering lower latency and as a result – high performance of the system.

Watch now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/building-a-high-performing-and-fault-tolerant-cluster-with-starwind-grid-architecture-video

To make the life of system administrators easier, StarWind has decided to further expand its feature set with StarWind Swordfish Provider delivering API functionality that simplifies storage allocation, monitoring, and management. The addition of Swordfish API ultimately simplifies the integration of StarWind into any existing environment and allows controlling your storage infrastructure from a single pane of glass.

Read the full article by Alex Bykovskyi, a Solutions Architect at StarWind to learn how to configure and implement StarWind Swordfish Provider.

During this webinar, StarWind will be benchmarking and comparing the performance of local storage and Highly Available shared storage created with StarWind Virtual SAN. Also, it will discuss the best practices for testing storage performance. StarWind Storage Test tool will be used to perform the benchmark as it delivers a detailed picture of the storage performance and compares the amount of compute power utilized in both cases.

Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/compare-the-performance-of-your-local-storage-and-starwind-highly-available-shared-storage

A Virtual Private Network connection allows creating a secure connection over shared or public networks, such as the Internet, to a private network at a remote location. VPN can be installed on Windows Server 2016 to protect the network and remote connection from attacks or data sniffing via tunneling protocols inside of a standard data connection.

Read the full article by Vladan Seget, IT and Virtualization consultant to learn how to deploy Remote Access VPN on Windows Server 2016.

StarWind Virtual Tape Library eliminates any need for physical tapes by emulating the existing tape hardware on HDDs, accelerating the backup process and allowing it to fit the backup window. It allows transferring backups to cost efficient cloud storage like Microsoft Azure, delivering an extra level of protection and cutting down storage expenses. Integration of StarWind VTL with Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager and Azure protects the data from any type of disasters and ensures the “3-2-1” backup rule.

Read the full article by Alex Khorolets, a technical support engineer at StarWind to learn how to deploy StarWind VTL as a backup repository for Microsoft SCDPM 2016 in Azure cloud storage.

The Microsoft Active Directory Migration Tool v3.2 is a free utility allowing to migrate object like users, groups, computers, profiles etc. between two Windows Server Active Directory domains in the same forest using the ADMT console, command line, and VBScript. This post is particularly focused on migrating users, groups and computers account from child domain to parent domain using ADMT snap-in and PowerShell.

Read the full article by Karim Buzdar, a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate for Server Infrastructure to learn more about Intraforest migration with the help of ADMT v3.2.

Microsoft has released the new Virtual Network Peering feature allowing to connect 2 Virtual Networks in the same region through the Azure Datacenter network. The new functionality allows to connect 2 Azure Resource Manager VNets in the same or different subscription or to connect ARM VNet to Classic VNet in the same subscription.

Read the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies to learn more about Azure VNet peering capabilities: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/azure-virtual-network-peering

Dell Performance Analysis Collection Kit helps to eliminate overspending, speed-up decision-making and analyze opportunities for IT infrastructure virtualization and expansion by providing users with full information on their current environment. Dell DPACK analyzes such core characteristics as IOPS, latency and server workload delivering comprehensive and detailed reports with aggregated information on the entire system and on individual servers.

Learn how to use Dell DPACK to properly plan your IT environment virtualization.

Watch the video: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/how-to-understand-your-it-environment-with-dell-dpack

Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controllers are responsible for granting or denying user’s access to system-wide resources, such as printers, documents, and network locations using the single name and password. Proper configurations, such as setting up two Domain Controllers and backing up one of them, allow creating a fault-tolerant and highly available environment.

Learn about proper Active Directory Domain Controllers configurations to create a fault-tolerant environment.

Watch now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/useful-tips-for-setting-up-microsoft-active-directory-domain-controllers-video

Dell Performance Analysis Collection Kit is a free and agentless tool providing the full information on the IT environment performance and estimating opportunities for its virtualization. DPACK analyzes such core parameters as disk IO, throughput, capacity and memory utilization and provides two types of reports: in-depth individual server report and an aggregation of resource needs across disparate servers with a simulation of those workloads when migrated to shared platforms.

Watch our webinar to learn how to properly analyze your environment with Dell DPACK.
Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/dedicated-live-demo-session

The so-called “grid architecture” allows building a high-performing and fault-tolerant cluster without losing the principle of “data locality” for maximum performance. In such cluster topology, nodes are connected into a single grid, delivering a high resiliency rate and allowing the cluster to stay operational even after multiple nodes failure.

Join our Tap Room to learn about the benefits that StarWind Grid Architecture will bring to your IT infrastructure.
Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/dedicated-live-demo-session-next

Microsoft Active Directory allows organizations to store and manage network resources, including users, computers, and services in a centralized and standardized system. Domain controllers are the server computers responsible for user authentication in a Windows domain. To provide fault tolerance of your environment, each domain requires two functioning domain controllers located on different servers.

Watch our webinar to learn useful tips on setting up domain controllers in your infrastructure.
Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/dedicated-live-demo-session

StarWind Virtual Tape Library converts existing hardware into virtual tapes becoming a perfect backup repository solution for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager. Integrating StarWind VTL with SCDPM 2016 allows to replace slow physical tapes with a virtual tape library and improve the performance of your backup infrastructure while achieving the 3-2-1 backup rule.

Watch our webinar to learn how StarWind VTL and SCDPM combine to increase your backup infrastructure performance.

Register now: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/dedicated-live-demo-session