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Tag: failover-cluster

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Volodymyr Perishko
  • Volodymyr Perishko
  • July 13, 2024

Can SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance run twice as fast as SQL Server Basic Availability Groups in 2-node cluster? Part 3: Comparison time!

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).
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Volodymyr Perishko
  • Volodymyr Perishko
  • March 4, 2024

Can SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance run on S2D twice as fast as SQL Server Availability Groups on Storage Spaces? Summary

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.
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Volodymyr Perishko
  • Volodymyr Perishko
  • January 16, 2024

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.
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Orest Lesyuk
  • Orest Lesyuk
  • June 29, 2023

Microsoft SQL Server High Availability: Always On Availability Groups VS Failover Cluster Instances. What to choose and when?

Microsoft SQL Server is the backbone of many businesses, but when it comes to high availability, which path should you take: Always On Availability Groups (AG) or Failover Cluster Instances (FCI)?
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Boris Yurchenko
  • Boris Yurchenko
  • June 12, 2018

Basic Hyper-V virtual NIC management

Let’s be honest, any system administrator may face the need of hot-adding the network interfaces to the guest VMs in his Microsoft Hyper-V environment one day. And that’s no problem as Windows Server 2016 brought in a whole set of useful features, one of which is the ability to add and remove network adapters on the running VMs. Moreover, you can do that in two ways – GUI, if you’re looking for a straightforward process and PowerShell if you are a fan of automation.
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Dmytro Malynka
  • Dmytro Malynka
  • June 5, 2018

Forget about disasters sabotaging your IT environment thanks to stretched clustering

These days, businesses do not stick to one location anymore. Such trend pushes companies to build stretched clusters, IT infrastructures spanned across several locations. Such approach enables them to implement better disaster recovery strategies and achieve higher performance. To build such environments, you need fast connection and the solution to use resources of all your remote sites just as they were located in one place. Here, VSAN from StarWind comes into play – the solution for building high performing active-active replicated shared storage.
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Paulsen Muzari
  • Paulsen Muzari
  • March 14, 2018

Whip your Hyperconverged Failover Cluster into shape automatically and with no downtime using Microsoft’s Cluster Aware Updating

Some admins prefer the Cluster updates to be done automatically. To do so, Microsoft designed a feature to facilitate patching of Windows Servers from 2012 to 2016 that are configured in a failover cluster. Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) does this automatically, thereby avoiding service disruption for clustered roles. In this article, we are going to take a look into how we can achieve this assuming that Cluster is built with hyperconverged scenario and VSAN from StarWind used as a shared storage. Before going in the steps to set the CAU, we will investigate this scenario.
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Vitalii Feshchenko
  • Vitalii Feshchenko
  • February 1, 2018

The main features of 2016 Failover Cluster

In our support work very often we face different environments. They can range from three VMs to a hundred of those, with the number of nodes from two to ten. Today, I will tell you about the main features of Failover Cluster 2016, which are applicable to any environment.
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Boris Yurchenko
  • Boris Yurchenko
  • January 11, 2018

Cluster Rolling Upgrade from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016

During its lifetime, any system reaches a point when it needs to be upgraded, either in terms of hardware or software. Today, I will talk about such changes, in particular, about upgrading Windows Failover Cluster nodes from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016 with no production interruption. Thanks to Microsoft, we do have a Cluster Rolling Upgrade procedure at our fingertips, and I am going to get through it and confirm it works for virtualized disks as cluster shared volumes in Windows Failover Cluster. This procedure assumes rebuilding nodes with clean OS deployment one by one, while the production keeps running from the other cluster node.
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