Posts made by Oksana

Almost every application run in our datacenters can be orchestrated via some sort of web-based interface. It allows you to access things wherever you are from whatever browser. Everything looks wonderful, but there’s one thing – self-signed certificates. Sometimes, they become really annoying due to making your browser whine about accepting numerous self-signed certs. Fortunately, there’s Microsoft Certificate Server, the role within Active Directory environment that stops all that nightmare.

Read the full article by Mike Preston, Toronto VMUG Co-Leader and vExpert, to find out how to avoid all those annoying self-signed certificates with Microsoft Certificate Server.

Unfortunately, all environments fail one day. Mistakes are made, disasters occur, and there are no IT infrastructures immune to that yet. Being a system admin or IT department manager, the only thing you can do to mitigate troubles’ harsh consequences is coming up with a disaster recovery strategy and employing a nice dedicated solution. If your IT environment runs on Windows Server 2016, we are happy to discuss some of them.

Learn from our upcoming free webinar about architecting a disaster recovery site for IT ecosystems run on Windows Server 2016 with Storage Replica, Hyper-V Replica, or Veeam Replica.

Setting up Live-Migration only for a couple of nodes in Hyper-V cluster is not rocket science. Sure, it requires some time, but nothing more than that. Still, in large environments, where you have, let’s say, 40 or even more nodes, configuring Live Migration manually looks like torture. Fortunately, we know a way around!

Read the full article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant, to find out how to set up Live-Migration in Hyper-V clusters faster and easier.

Microsoft considers AlwaysOn as an agile and efficient set of technologies capable of ensuring high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for SQL Server platform. You should really learn a bit more about this tech even if you are already familiar with it.

Why? Just ‘cause AlwaysOn saves you from stitching an HADR solutions from various different vendors that at the end of the day turns your life into one big finger pointing session.

Read the full article by Mikhail Rodionov, IT engineer focusing on applications and infrastructure support domains, to figure out what SQL AlwaysOn is and how it works.

That’s kinda of a black box for these guys that contains log files, diagnostic information, and performance metrics which together provide them with the insight into what’s going on with your environment.
Find out more about retrieving a support bundle in the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization technology professional.

For decades, RAID has dominated enterprise storage, but this technology isn’t a hot topic these days. Does it mean that RAID is gone and forgotten? No, it still is in use, and everyone knows it. Sure, there’re alternatives like RAIN, which beats RAID in some cases. But, does it really mean that it can ditch RAID so far?

Read the full article by Scott Miller, IT strategist and researcher, to learn why RAID still has its disks spinning.

Not that long time ago, Microsoft launched DevOps Projects, a new service intended for deployment and monitoring your applications in Azure. Thanks to this service, implementing DevOps with Azure becomes a matter of 5 minutes, even if you lack VSTS and TFS skills.

Read the full article by Nicolas Prigent, a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management, to learn more how new Azure service can come in handy.

One day, any IT environment grows. Then, it becomes your storage admin’s mission to grant all your colleagues’ data availability in all locations. That sounds like your work is to become more hectic, right? Fortunately, we know the way around!

Learn from our upcoming free webinar how building Hyper-V or vSphere stretched cluster comes in handy.

Installing an HTTPS certificate is just a tip of the iceberg. This certificate has a huge number of options that usually are hidden deep inside config files. Actually, these tiny details allow distinguishing a site that can be rendered vulnerable via HTTPS downgrade attack and the one that is really secure.

Read the full article by Gary Williams, a virtualization, storage, and Windows systems administrator, to achieve the highest security.

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.