There isn’t always time (or desire) to configure and deploy each VM manually. Therefore, StarWind has decided to make the said process for its users easier by automating the deployment of StarWind VSAN for vSphere VMs. The present guide will take through the steps necessary to achieve future automation.

One, two, three … Let’s roll! StarWind presents an updated functionality of V2V Converter. The utility enables conversion of a physical machine into a virtual one (P2V) and other way around. For example, you have a server with Windows Server 2012R2 installed running some critical application. With physical-to-virtual (P2V) entire host or specific physical drive (or volume) can be migrated. What else? The pressure is on! Now your VMs can be migrated directly between Hyper-V and ESXi (and backwards). Moreover, StarWind V2V Converter offers bi-directional conversion between all the major VM formats: VMDK, VHD/VHDX (Windows Repair Mode aware), QCOW2, and StarWind native IMG.

StarWind & VMware vSphere users get unrestricted VSAN from StarWind features, storage capacity, and outstanding cost-efficiency. Using StarWind VSAN, the process of deploying VMs, providing fault-tolerant storage, connecting it to hypervisor, and creating highly available VMs becomes a “piece o’ cake!”. But what about software RAID configuration? How not to get lost in a variety of choices between the different RAID levels?

In this article, I discuss what VSAN from StarWind for vSphere is and how to set it up on the hardware RAID. StarWind VSAN for vSphere is a Software-Defined Storage solution that is designed specifically for vSphere environments. It comes as a preconfigured VM template, so just a couple of quick steps are needed to start running your vSphere environment on StarWind VSAN: download the solution, deploy it, and “play”. Here, I want to share some tips and tricks on working with VSAN for vSphere.

This article describes the deployment of a Ceph cluster in one instance or as it’s called “Ceph-all-in-one”. As you may know, Ceph is a unified Software-Defined Storage system designed for great performance, reliability, and scalability. With the help of Ceph, you can build an environment with the desired size. You can start with a one-node system and there are no limits in its sizing. I will show you how to build the Ceph cluster on top of one virtual machine (or instance). You should never use such scenario in production, only for testing purposes. The series of articles will guide you through the deployment and configuration of different Ceph cluster builds.

The fast-paced world of system administration is growing on a large scale and picking up steam all the time. The migration of business to the cloud we can see these days is a good example of the above said. Thus, the continuous pursuit of a tool that would simplify the life of a system administrator constantly stays on the agenda of the IT world. The main goal behind the development of the Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is eliminating the long journey of finding the right solution. To simplify the life of system administrators to an even greater extent, the StarWind team has decided to additionally complete the feature set by developing the StarWind Swordfish Provider.

This article describes the new StarWind Virtual Storage Appliance, which was released on 26th of April. StarWind has always been a Windows native solution. However, due to market trends and the huge interest of our customers, we have decided to work in Linux direction. The main goal of the article is to show what StarWind VSA can do for clients and how you can work with it.

In this article, we are going to continue testing Synology DS916+ with VSAN from StarWind. Our main goal today is to improve the performance of Synology boxes specifically on random patterns. Randoms were chosen for a reason. SQL and OLTP workloads tend to cause huge stress, especially, to spindle arrays, generating a heavily randomized I/O. Patterns we are choosing for today’s benchmark are common for such environments. There are different approaches, which can handle these workload types, such as caching and tiering. Our approach is to build environment with StarWind Log-Structured File System. LSFS was created exactly for this type of environments to improve the performance. We will compare the results we receive to the ones from Part 1 of our research.