Posts made by Oksana

Install Gitlab: the tool that comes in handy for any admin
Many of us view Gitlab as something that only developers may use. Indeed, these guys love it, but are they the only ones who may find it handy? That’s time to dispel that myth! Gitlab is more than the cool repository for scripts of any size and shape. It is a feature-rich solution, so that won’t be fair to leave that thing on the table.

Find out more about what Gitlab is and how to enable HTTPS and container registry in the full article by Gary Williams, a virtualization, storage, and Windows systems administrator.

Regarding the growing demand on the cloud, it’s no problem finding a cloud storage provider. However, there are only few market players that can be considered true leaders of this industry. Amazon is one of these guys, with S3 cloud storage serving a perfect fit for any business regardless of its size. But still, even Amazon’s customers face several challenges during data migration process to S3, especially, when it comes to petabytes.

Read the full article by Sergey Sanduliak, a Technical Support Engineer at StarWind, to learn about 5 awesome solutions that make data migration to AWS easier.

Looking to replace your tape-based backup infrastructure with cost-efficient and convenient cloud and backup storage but don’t wanna ruin the established backup process? Join us at VeeamON 2018 to find a remedy to this problem – new free StarWind Virtual Tape Library technology! At the event, Max Kolomyeytsev, Product Director at StarWind, will take the floor with a presentation: "How to keep your backup process unchanged when replacing physical tapes with object and cloud storage” to showcase all the benefits of this new solution. When? May 16, 1:35 PM.

We’re waiting for you at booth 501.

Learn more about StarWind VTL free here!

Unfortunately, all IT environments are vulnerable to disasters, errors, and power outages. There’s nothing you can do about that. Still, being an IT department manager or a system admin, you can set up your environment so that production keeps on running despite a disaster.

Learn from our recent video about such conventional disaster recovery site options for Windows Server 2016 as Storage Replica, Veeam Replica, and Microsoft Hyper-V Replica.

Now, thanks to Veeam Agents, you can perform remotely orchestration- and data-protection-related tasks on all computers within IT environment at once right from the Veeam Backup & Replication console. Looks cool, right? Well, with Protection Groups, things become even better: you can automate that stuff!

Find out more about Veeam Backup & Replication Protection Groups and how to use them in the full article by Paolo Valsecchi, Veeam Vanguard System Engineer and VMware vExpert.

Reddit is a perfect place to get into news and trends, isn’t it? Actually, that’s why StarWind has started a subreddit!
There, we share blog articles, announce events, and discuss interesting stuff going on in IT these days.

Stay tuned, subscribe to StarWind’s subreddit!

Database availability is a must-have for modern businesses. You, a database admin, are to keep the risk of data loss minimal. Sure, you need some tools to accomplish that mission. In the series of upcoming free webinars, we’ll discuss technologies that may come in handy.

Find out more about SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances!

StarWind announces the new generation of StarWind HyperConverged Appliances. What will they give you? Being 100% software-defined, the Appliances require only one onsite node to make your applications Highly Available. Once one more node added, the entire setup can tolerate one disk and even single node failure. Another nice thing about the solution is that it makes sysadmin's life easier due to bringing configuration, migration, and integration efforts entirely on StarWind’s side.

For more info, check out the product page!

Evolving along with companies’ needs, Microsoft is about to release new Windows Server 2019. Feeling comfortable with the good old 2016 version? Get ready for something even better!

Learn more about the features Windows Server 2019 will bring to your IT environment in the full article by Karim Buzdar, a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate for Server Infrastructure.

Two previous articles addressed SMB Direct and cool features brought to it by RDMA. This article is where the story ends. It covers on competing RDMA flavors for use with SMB Direct and contrasts RoCE and iWARP protocols.

Find out more about peculiarities of RDMA extension in SMB Direct in the full article by Didier Van Hoye, an experienced subject matter expert advisor and infrastructure architect.

While updating, VMware ESXi may display the “No space left on device” error without any good reason. Indeed, you may have pretty much free space when this guy starts nagging. Well, we know what’s going on with your host.

Find out how to resolve the “No space left on device” problem in ESXi hosts in the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization technology professional.

The previous article from this series shed light on SMB Direct and why you need it. Regarding the features RDMA brings to SMB Direct, it deserves a separate article! So, this part covers which flavors of RDMA are available for use with SMB Direct.

Read the full article by Didier Van Hoye, an experienced subject matter expert advisor and infrastructure architect, to learn more the role RDMA plays in SMB Direct.

StarWind team will take part in VeeamON 2018 – the premier conference for intelligent data management. The event will be held in McCormick Place, Chicago and is aimed to bring together thousands of IT peers and industry leaders to learn about what’s working best in their industries and explore innovative technologies. At VeeamON 2018, we will introduce our latest solution – StarWind Virtual Tape Library. It is designed to automate data backup and archive processes while increasing their cost-efficiency and security by bringing in cloud and object storage support.

Join us at booth 501! Awesome gits and swag guaranteed.

Squeeze all the performance out of your Hyper-V with SMB Direct SMB Direct is too cool to be left on the table. However, that’s not a “plug-and-play” thing – before bringing that thing to your environment, you need to understand the technology itself and your environment.

Q: How many IOPS can your Windows Server do?
A: ALL OF THEM!

Find out more about SMB Direct and how the technology improvement over SMB 3.0 comes in handy in your virtualization or SQL Server environment in the full article by Didier Van Hoye, an experienced subject matter expert advisor and infrastructure architect.

Companies expand, and IT ecosystems are to keep up with their pace. Usually, such growth is associated with opening one or more new offices. This brings admins not only new toys to play with but also makes their work more annoying. Indeed, that’s your storage admin’s mission to grant all your colleagues their data availability wherever they are, right? Fortunately, we know how to help you.

Learn from our recent video how building Hyper-V or vSphere stretched clusters simplifies your IT routines.

These days, Amazon AWS has become one of the most popular public cloud storages. No wonders, these guys offer extremely cheap storage and cover their service for good. Though, you are to stay vigilant: without careful control over your expenditures on the cloud, even Amazon AWS may break your bank!

Read the full article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies, to learn how to set up a solution for managing Amazon AWS costs.

Using Microsoft Azure for whatever purpose (be it extending production, or gaining some extra storage), is usually believed to be cheaper compared to buying new hardware. Still, without careful control, expenditures on the cloud may cost you pretty penny!

Find out in the recent article by Florent Appointaire, a Microsoft Engineer specialized in Cloud Technologies, how to control your spending on Azure.

Regardless of Docker’s awesome command-line interface (CLI), some users stick to fancy graphical user interfaces (GUI). This is typical for not only guys new to Docker but also seasoned admins who just prefer GUI to CLI to handle routine tasks. Still, that’s not that easy to pick a GUI to orchestrate Docker containers in Windows environment.

Learn from the recent article by Nicolas Prigent, a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management, about handy GUIs to manage Windows Containers.

In fact, underlying storage you have determines your applications’ performance. That’s not something new for you and, being a storage admin, you know that excellent storage performance is about not only disks but also the right system configuration.

Learn from this video how to configure your system to squeeze maximum performance out of your NVMes.

This article finalizes the trilogy about building a Highly Available (HA) and Fault-Tolerant (FT) production environment with Microsoft Windows Server 2016. Putting the long story short, two previous articles covered on installing Windows Server 2016 Core on a single server and adding shared storage for VMs. Though all storage admins know that two nodes are much better than one, so we cannot leave a single node! The final solution must be redundant. That, actually, is why we need Failover Cluster Role to be added.

Read the full article by Alex Khorolets, a technical support engineer at StarWind, to learn how to deploy the Failover Clustering role.