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.

Finally, I got the hands-on experience with StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator. I read that StarWind did a lot of work to bring NVMe-oF to Windows (it’s basically the first solution of its kind), so it’s quite interesting for me to see how their initiator works! In today’s post, I measure the performance of NVMe drive presented over Linux SPDK NVMe-oF Target while talking to it over StarWind NVMe-oF Initiator.

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.

Server virtualization helped businesses increase productivity and efficiency of their IT infrastructures by abstracting physical servers’ workloads from the underlying hardware with little to no loss of functionality, VDI applied quite the same logic. Desktops and applications run inside virtual machines that are hosted centrally, either on a server or in the cloud. The purpose of VDI is to deliver fully-featured user desktops to a variety of devices including conventional PCs, thin clients, and even zero-client endpoints. But how something that was seen as a bright alternative to the traditional server-based computing model used by Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services a decade ago ended up being a niched deployment?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.