StarWind Blog

Dmitriy Dolgiy
April 16, 2018

How to save disk space in Clustered File Servers on Windows Server 2016 using Data Deduplication feature

For that matter, I’ll create a file server of two types: “File server for general use” and Scale-Out File Server. For the latter, I’ll have two scenarios: VMs running and off. After that, I’m gonna evaluate the deduplication ratio using a free tool – StarWind Deduplication Analyzer. And finally, run data deduplication using the Windows Server 2016 Data Deduplication feature. We also need our storage shared, so for this purpose, I’ve decided on StarWind Virtual SAN Free.

Didier Van Hoye
April 12, 2018

SMB Direct – The State of RDMA for use with SMB 3 traffic (Part I)

What is RDMA and why do we like it.

Florent Appointaire
April 10, 2018

[AWS] Use Cloudyn to manage your costs

Now that you deploy Cloudyn (see the other article), we will connect our AWS environment to have only one interface, to manage cost for all our cloud provider subscription. Be careful, from June, this interface will not be free anymore for AWS. It’ll cost you 1% of your annual subscription consumption.

Florent Appointaire
April 5, 2018

[Azure] Deploy Cloudyn to manage the cost of your subscriptions

Some months ago, Microsoft acquires the Cloudyn company. This company developed an interface to manage your cost and to have billing information, for one or multiple subscription, on one console. They support some other cloud service provider like AWS and Google Cloud, it’s why it’s very interesting. For Azure, it’s free of charge to use this software. You can connect your EA, CSP or other subscription. For AWS, it’s free until June, after it will cost 1% of your revenue (on AWS or Google Cloud).

Nicolas Prigent
April 4, 2018

Managing Windows Containers with Graphical User Interfaces

In this article, I will describe how to manage Windows Containers via GUI. Docker provides a great Docker CLI that allows us to create, interact, and delete containers, but sometimes it’s nice to have an interface to manage Containers. There are many admins who much prefer a GUI tool to handle every task and it can be useful to use an interface when you have many containers to manage or if you start working with Docker. In this article, I don’t want to judge which GUI is better because it depends! You must use the GUI that will suit your needs. So do not hesitate to test this GUI.

Alex Khorolets
April 3, 2018

Windows Server 2016 Core configuration. Part 3: Failover Clustering

Looking back at the previous articles in our “How-to-Core basics”, we have managed to install the Core version of Windows Server 2016. As well, the required networks were set, and the storage for the virtual machines was created. In the final part of the trilogy, I’ll cover the steps left to prepare the environment in order to make your production highly available and fault-tolerant.

Mike Preston
March 29, 2018

Using the Microsoft Certificate Authority to get rid of those self-signed certs

Most every application we run in our datacenters today provides some sort of web-based interface. The push to move to HTML5, API driven GUIs is a good one – we can access things from anywhere, using any device or browser. The problem being we are also seeing a push for security, more specifically ensuring that all our web accessible interfaces are running through SSL and only accessed through https. To get around this administrators can go out and purchase a certificate from a trusted authority, however this could get pretty expensive if you start adding up all of the self-signed certificates within your environment. Another answer – the Microsoft Certificate Server.

Romain Serre
March 28, 2018

Configure Live Migration in Hyper-V clusters

In part of my job, I audit some Hyper-V clusters to remediate issues such as Live Migration. Most of the time, Live Migration part is not well configured. For example, the wrong network is selected or authentication is left to CredSSP. In this topic, I’ll show you how I configure Live Migration in Hyper-V clusters (S2D or not).

Mikhail Rodionov
March 27, 2018

SQL AlwaysOn

I guess once you will read through this article you will also notice how this technology is shaped out of familiar building blocks, but what I also hope for is that you will get a grasp of what is AlwaysOn, and get a basic understanding of how it works. I will fully cover installation and configuration of SQL Server AlwaysOn environment (using new and shiny SQL Server 2017) in my next article while focusing on technology overview here.

Educational Episodes: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Featured blog posts

All blog posts

How to save disk space in Clustered File Servers on Windows Server 2016 using Data Deduplication feature

SMB Direct – The State of RDMA for use with SMB 3 traffic (Part I)

[AWS] Use Cloudyn to manage your costs

[Azure] Deploy Cloudyn to manage the cost of your subscriptions

Managing Windows Containers with Graphical User Interfaces

Windows Server 2016 Core configuration. Part 3: Failover Clustering

Using the Microsoft Certificate Authority to get rid of those self-signed certs

Configure Live Migration in Hyper-V clusters

SQL AlwaysOn