Double Fine Productions is the company specialized in game development. Working in this industry, Double Fine requires a powerful environment to proceed and store all those tons of media data that it generates. Using just directly attached storage and VMware ESXi, the company could not achieve high performance. So, they were looking for storage to ensure decent applications performance, fast recovery rates, and effective load balancing. However, guys at Double Fine did not want to change the existing hardware... because it was a far way smarter just to deploy a Software-Defined Storage solution on top of what they already had!

Check out how Double Fine dramatically enhanced the overall infrastructure performance with StarWind.

All-cloud IT infrastructures can save you both the money and the hassle. Wait, what is that special about cloud-based environments? In the public cloud, you can run the IT infrastructure that perfectly fits your requirements and scale it easily as you go. Also, that won’t be that expensive and tedious as running an on-premises environment!

Find out more about how and why build all-cloud IT environment in our upcoming free webinar.

VMware vSphere 6.7 features persistent memory support – the non-volatile data storage technology that is fast enough to cover the performance difference between RAM and Flash/SSD. It is the perfect fit for IOPS-intense applications and high-loaded databases. Well, we guess that’s high time to learn how to create VMs with persistent memory disks.

Read the full article by Alex Samoylenko, a virtualization technology professional, to find out more about how fast persistent memory is and how to use it in VMware vSphere VMs.

For many, Veeam Backup & Replication is the solution of choice for backing up and disaster recovery. Why? This powerful solution saves your data from ransomware or loss. Also, it enables to build a disaster recovery site to keep your production up and running no matter what happens to your main site.

Find out how to make a disaster recovery plan with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 in the full article by Romain Serre, a Senior Consultant.

Looking for a bit higher performance for Windows system? Well, try optimizing it with VMware OS Optimization Tool! That’s a small tool with enormous possibilities created for more than just to optimize Windows systems for use with VMware Horizon View. Basically, you can disable some Windows services to make your system run more “light” and save some more resource for the REALLY useful apps.

Learn more about how to set up and use VMware OS Optimization Tool in the full article by Vladan Seget, an IT and Virtualization consultant

Database uptime is a must. Data loss is a definite “no no”. Consider a disaster recovery (DR) site to ensure your production uptime and guarantee data integrity and availability no matter what happens to your main site.

In our upcoming free webinar, we discuss the technology that may come in handy.
Find out how to build a disaster recovery (DR) site and ensure your database availability with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AGs).

Register here!

Security is always a hot topic, and you, a sysadmin, are a guy to ensure it. You, typically, should not only save your data from being stolen or compromised but also prevent any possible security breaches at all. True, having services down due to some DoS attack may be just as bad for your business as losing data… So, that’s why you, probably, should learn more about how to ensure your virtual environment security.

Check out the full article by Andrea Mauro, a virtualization expert and architect, to learn how to find and cover your virtualized environment security gaps.

Back in April 2018, Microsoft announced Azure Container Instances for production usage. Wait, what is that thing, actually, for? Azure Container Instances offers the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure. You need just one command to run a container, and, you do not need to provision a VM or deploy a container host anymore.

Read the full article by Nicolas Prigent, Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management, to learn how to create Azure Container Instances and how to use it

Before, Cantey Tech Consulting IT infrastructure comprised single-target SANs with VMware ESX hypervisor. The company required the performance and services availability beyond the ones its existing environment could provide. For that purpose, Cantey Tech Consulting required a decent software-defined storage. However, traditional solutions either exceeded the company’s budget or were tricky to deploy. Here, StarWind Virtual SAN came into play.

Learn from this success story how Cantey Tech Consulting achieved high availability of cloud services and boosted SAN performance with StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is a well-known, historically-proven, and performance leading Software-Defined Storage solution. It is now available in two very different scenarios – one (Linux virtual machine based packaging) is specifically aimed at VMware vSphere users, another one (application residing inside hypervisor kernel) is targeted at those who run Microsoft Hyper-V. Here comes better flexibility, less restrictions, and simplified licensing. Free edition still remains a “low hanging fruit” with all the commercial version features except UI (it’s CLI only) and without guaranteed support. Yes, production use is allowed.

Check out more details here

Regular backups are necessary to cope with possible data loss and restore information from the earlier times when needed. Even though copying data to Amazon S3 from a remote server is already possible, additional software not fully supported by Amazon is required, which makes the backup process painful. In case you are tired with such an exhausting backup procedure, you have a great chance to explore how AWS CLI can be extremely helpful in the case.

Check out the full article by Gary Williams, an experienced virtualization, storage and Windows systems administrator, to learn more about the updated AWS CLI and the options it provides for the convenient backup.

Even though hybrid cloud is quite trendy these days, there are very few VMware admins who use VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX). This platform removes boundaries between your on-prem infrastructure and cloud one. So, if you intend extending your environment to the cloud one day, take your time and learn more about VMware HCX benefits and how this solution is deployed.

Check out the full article by Askar Kopbayev, the Senior Consultant at VMware, to find out more about VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension deployment, and solution benefits.

Picking a Software-Defined Storage solution for a VMware vSphere environment may be a hard nut to crack due to tough licensing, strict hardware compatibility lists, and need for special skills to deploy and manage that thing. For all admins familiar with those pains our solution is Linux-based StarWind VSAN – hardware-agnostic, minimalistic and cost-efficient solution to ensure high apps availability in vSphere environments.

Learn from our recent video how to promote availability of your applications running in VMware vSphere with Linux-based StarWind Virtual SAN.

Hybrid cloud is trendy these days, but a few virtualization experts know what VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is. VMware HCX is a platform to erase boundaries between your on-prem infrastructure and public cloud. It delivers app mobility by creating hybridity across vSphere 5.0 and higher. So, if you are going to build hybrid-cloud environment that’s high time to learn more about VMware HCX!

Learn more about what VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension is and why you need in it the full article by Askar Kopbayev, the Senior Consultant at VMware.

For many companies, tapes still remain the media of choice for long-term archival purposes. But, wait, if you are a Veeam Backup & Replication user, there’s a better way to ensure business continuity and unlock Hyper-Availability – StarWind VTL for Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. Just set up both solutions and Azure, and you are ready to go! The nice thing about the StarWind VTL is that you can streamline the backup environment and extend your tape-based backups to Microsoft Azure without changing the entire thing.

Find out how to extend your archival options to Microsoft Azure in the full article by Andrew Zhelezko, a Veeam Technical Product Analyst.

For many companies, tapes still remain the media of choice for long-term archival purposes. But, wait, if you are a Veeam Backup & Replication user, there’s a better way to ensure business continuity and unlock Hyper-Availability – StarWind VTL. And, the nice thing about the solution is that you can streamline the backup environment and extend it to Microsoft Azure without changing the entire thing!

Find out how to extend tape-based data to Microsoft Azure with Veeam and StarWind in the upcoming joint webinar.

Register now!

Typically, Content Libraries are used for keeping VM templates, vApp templates, ISO files, and all that jazz you typically share within your network. With such capability, that thing makes vSphere admins’ life easier allowing them to ensure consistency within the infrastructure under workloads. So, if you have never used it before, it may be high time to learn more about Content Libraries.

Learn the basics of working with Content Libraries in VMware vSphere 6.5 in the full article by Paolo Valsecchi, Veeam Vanguard System Engineer and VMware vExpert.

Before, Young America LLC, a digital marketing company, run a worn-out standalone VMware ESXi server. No redundancy. No high availability. No business continuity! In a hurry, the company almost picked a traditional SAN. But, after a thorough investigation, Young America decided to try out virtualization technologies far and wide and ditch “classic” SAN in favor of a Virtual SAN (VSAN) by StarWind Software.

Find out how StarWind Virtual SAN helped Young America to achieve business continuity with off-the-shelf hardware.