NVMe is quite a promising technology that becomes more and more prevalent in IT environments of any size. PCIe SSDs deliver awesome performance, low latencies… still, they are far too expensive. Anyway, money, in this case, seems a problem of secondary importance. The main reason why many have not added NVMe drives to their servers yet is inability of this storage media to be presented effectively over the network: iSCSI seems to be inefficient for flash, so it is an issue. Solution? NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF or NVMf, how it was called before) – the protocol created to present NVMe flash over the network!

Setting up a failover cluster is a thing that admins must do. To build such cluster, you need to configure shared storage. And, there are a lot of ways to do that. Today, I’d like to discuss how to build a Windows Failover Cluster using a virtual SAN solution (StarWind Virtual SAN) as a shared storage provider.

Since I’m done with measuring SQL Server Availability Groups (AG) on Storage Spaces and SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) on Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) performance, I can write the most interesting part in this series: performance comparison.

Some time ago, I published here comparison of SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) and SQL Server Availability Group (AG) performance while having them run on top of StarWind Virtual SAN (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/hyper-v/can-sql-server-failover-cluster-instance-run-twice-fast-sql-server-basic-availability-groups-2-node-cluster-part-2-studying-fci-performance/). Today, I measure SQL Server AG performance on Storage Spaces. The next part sheds light on SQL Server FCI performance on S2D. Can I squeeze two times more TPM out of SQL Server FCI on S2D than SQL Server AG can provide on Storage Spaces?

Windows 10 Creator Update introduced Quick Create to Hyper-V, the feature allowing to create a custom VM from a Hyper-V Quick Create gallery image. It is a handy tool for testing new software or OS features which developers and guys in QA may enjoy a lot. This being said, I describe today how to create a VM template and add it to a gallery.

Since Windows Server 2019 release, the Internet is booming with its reviews. Someday, I maybe write my own one too. Till then, why don’t we focus on something more important than just listing new Windows Server features? In today’s post, I share the scripts for creating and formatting bootable USB disks for Windows Server.

In this article, I compare deployment of Microsoft Azure SQL and SQL Server in a VM. I review the pros and cons of both approaches towards SQL Server deployment and take a closer look at cases when you may actually need each.

In this article, I’d like to compare results of the previous two and find out whether SQL Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) can provide you two times higher performance than SQL Server Basic Availability Groups (BAG).

This post addresses Hyper-V live migration – the topic which any admin faces with at some point. In my salad days of working as an admin, Hyper-V live migration was a saving grace, so I decided to write an article about it. Live migration is Hyper-V feature for moving non-disruptively a VM from one host to another. Users love this feature for flexibility and absence of downtime. You can easily migrate a VM from one host to another and it neither idles nor has to be shut down. On top of that, live migration, when paired with failover clustering, allows building highly available and fault-tolerant systems. Well, that’s why these technologies always come hand in hand. In this article, I want to cover some live migration and migration wizard settings that ensure maximum performance of this process.