BTT Cloud, a Lithuanian IT Managed Service Provider (MSP), had compute and storage separated scenario with software-defined storage (SDS) and Hyper-V on top. Such infrastructure was distinguished by a large hardware footprint and required a lot of time, effort, and tools for administration. With StarWind, the company moves to hyperconvergence and gets rid of tons of standalone servers.

Find out how BTT Cloud receives flexible and scalable IT infrastructure and breaks new ground for business growth with StarWind.

Not every company owns a sophisticated infrastructure packed with shared storage, virtual SANs, NVMe, etc. Migrating systems, especially VMs, in an average IT environment could create workload disruptions because you’d have to stall other processes. Finally, however, those days are over: vMotion can migrate your VMs while keeping all systems active and operational.

Read the guide by Paolo Valsecchi, a System Engineer, to learn how vMotion can help you hot migrate VMs within your vSphere environment even if you don’t have shared storage.

TechHQ released an article that dispels common myths about virtualization and hyperconvergence having skyrocketing prices. The piece explains the features that hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) bring and how, in the past, they were only available to big corporations. However, today, any business can build an HCI, and they cost only a fraction of what you would expect.

Read the full article by TechHQ about how businesses of any size can now get the desired enterprise-grade features without the enterprise price tag.

Microsoft Teams is set to supersede Skype for StaffHub and Business. It’s a powerful tool in itself, so knowing how to make the most of it is crucial for managing your workload organically. Luckily, PowerShell Universal Dashboard can help you monitor your Microsoft Teams Cloud call queues as if they were on the palm of your hand.

Read the easy guide by Nicolas Prigent, a Swiss System Engineer, to learn how to monitor your Microsoft Teams like a kapellmeister.

CSL, a leading provider of marine dry bulk cargo handling and delivery services, faced problems with too complicated maintenance and support, which begets the need for a hyperconverged solution instead of costly SAN one. They were looking for a cost-efficient solution and have found StarWind HCA, thereby performing maintenance without complexity, reducing hardware footprint, and overall improving performance and reliability.

Find out how CSL found a hyperconverged solution for their problems with StarWind and reduced hardware footprint of their datacenters from over 25 to 4 units.

Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) can become cumbersome for sysadmins to maintain. They’re locked to and have to switch between many user interfaces (UIs) to keep things in check. That’s finally over. StarWind Command Center is a single-pane-of-glass management and monitoring tool to operate any HCI (Hyper-V, vSphere, KVM, etc.). Our engineer will explain its essence, demonstrate its features, use case scenarios, practical benefits, and show you that HCI management can be a game — not a bane.

Tune in to learn how you can revolutionize the way you operate your HCI with as much as just a single tool.

Azure Monitor is a feature in Windows Admin Center that is still in preview, but you can make good use of it already. So why wait? Unfortunately, some people have issues with configuring alerts in Azure Monitor and rightfully so: it has to be done through Azure Portal. But don’t fret — it’s going to take you just a few minutes to get into it and set up whatever rules you need.

Read the quick guide by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to see how you can easily enable Azure Monitor for on-prem servers and configure the desired alerts.

Ontario School District, a US administrative body, had an outdated Virtual SAN solution that could be upgraded to a larger capacity with only significant investments. The organization was keen to get storage utilization efficiency without buying expensive software. Thanks to StarWind, the Ontario School District received shared storage, providing the previously unavailable opportunity to increase storage capacity without overpayments.

Find out how the Ontario School District gets a cost-efficient and reliable shared storage solution with disaster recovery and high availability features, all thanks to StarWind.

How to find out the truth about a product in post-truth times? Only by reading first-hand reviews from multiple sources. IT Central Station, an online review platform, has published a new report on such Software-Defined Storage (SDS) vendors as StarWind, Red Hat, Nutanix, and DataCore. And StarWind is named the top SDS solution. Do you trust? But always cut the cards.

Read the IT Central Station report to find out what your peers are saying about SDS vendors.

Users often take Linux or other OS vendors at their word for being foolproof and not needing additional security levers. Sysadmins don’t have the luxury of thinking that way. Otherwise, certain shady characters will aim for this weak spot and compromise your IT infrastructure. Fortunately, several tips can substantially toughen up your Linux servers.

Read the full article by Benoit Voirin, a Cyber Security consultant, about which commands and steps you should make to harden your Linux servers’ security right now.

Chalk Mountain Services, a US oil and gas transportation and logistics provider, had a Microsoft Hyper-V environment with no shared storage and no reliability. The company was keen to create a highly available (HA) virtual server environment, thus providing faster resource control within its IT infrastructure. With StarWind, Chalk Mountain Services built a failover cluster and got the opportunity to cross VMs to other servers while maintaining HA for outages and not compromising on performance.

Find out how Chalk Mountain Services creates an HA virtual server environment satisfying budget restrictions and reliability requirements with StarWind.

Benny D’Angelo Transport, a Canadian carrier company, had an IT infrastructure built from 10 standalone servers and 3 hypervisors with QNAP Network Attached Storage (NAS) as its single point of failure (SPOF). The company’s NAS was unable to ensure high performance because of the workload and crashed a few times, leading to prolonged downtime and financial loss. Thanks to StarWind, the company was able to tie its existing IT environment into a single fault-tolerant Hyper-V cluster.

Find out how Benny D’Angelo Transport achieved redundancy and forgot about downtime with StarWind.

Virtualization was always about making the most out of less. But corporations fighting over customers divided them into incompatible camps. Recently, though, the winds in the industry have changed. VMware just launched an application mobility platform that migrates and re-balances on-premises vSphere and non-vSphere (Hyper-V and KVM) infrastructures to public clouds based on VMware vCloud!

Read the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization expert, about the features and potential of the new VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) now.

Stats & Reports has recently published a Profession Intelligence Report on the international Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Market. The report provides an in-depth qualitative and quantitative data analysis, as well as a dynamic vision on the HCI market size and environment. The industry was commended for providing an astoundingly positive effect on the global economy. And StarWind was included among the primary forces that research and popularize HCI among the businesses of the world.

Read the detailed breakdown of the mentioned report by IndustryTide to see how HCI changes the game for business continuity and what role StarWind plays in it.

Perfection knows no limits and so does Windows Server. Microsoft is on a crusade of ever-perfecting it, and the new version has something to say, indeed. It seems like the company might be coming after virtualization vendors. Why? Well, some of the new features include storage migration, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, and ReFS deduplication… Just saying…

Read the article by Vladan Seget, an IT and Virtualization Consultant, to learn about the Top 5 New Features in Windows Server 2019.

The Newtron Group, a US electrical and instrumentation contractor, had compute and storage separated scenario with 7 Gateway compute nodes, Hitachi SAN, and Hyper-V on top. Maintaining a large number of servers required considerable money. The company sought to reduce the number of servers and get active-active high availability (HA). Thanks to StarWind, the organization got cost-efficient and reliable shared storage, delivering seamless availability, and decreased the number of servers by 4 times.

Find out how the Newtron Group lowers maintenance costs thanks to StarWind.

Updates in business processes that require using new products may entail changes in the IT environment that are meant to bump into vendor licensing conflicts. It’s especially relevant for the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP). Alternatively, the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) is more flexible to such changes. So, what do you do if you go from CSP to EA?

Read the article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to check out his guide on how to easily migrate resource groups within Azure if you’re switching from one subscription to another.

Fitzstone Limited, a legal service provider in Trinidad and Tobago, had 2 aging, outgoing servers with VMware ESXi on top, hosting all the company’s virtual servers, and a SAN device. There was a situation when everything was based on a single point of failure (SPOF) and all the means of protection were built on this fragile foundation. The company was to look for a shared storage solution to create a failover cluster. StarWind helped Fitzstone Limited to move to hyperconvergence using existing hardware resources, create a failover cluster ensuring constant applications uptime, and avoid the risk of a single point of failure (SPOF).

Find out how Fitzstone Limited provided high data availability (HA) and redundancy for its server at a reasonable cost with StarWind.

Are you a System Administrator or IT Manager calmly kicked back in the back of your SMB’s seemingly calm IT-environment but with a nagging “what if?” in case disasters come knocking? Then it’s time to get a bit more knowledge about disaster recovery so that your cluster is impeccable always. vSphere and Hyper-V have a lot of features to help you with that. There’s also more than meets the eye when it comes to native DR and VM replication options and Azure Site Recovery in VMware and Microsoft environments.

Learn from this video how you can become the perfect sentinel of your SMB’s business continuity.

The National Archives of Estonia had a rigid IT-infrastructure built around Dell AX4-5 array interconnected via redundant FC switches and HBAs with VMware ESXi on top. The IT-environment was to become more manageable, Highly Available (HA) and optimized without getting upgraded. Thanks to StarWind, the agency was able to reinvent its existing infrastructure into a failover cluster with a flexible and cheap virtual SAN.

Find out how The National Archives of Estonia achieved HA and performance optimization with StarWind.