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.

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.

Find out from the StarWind blog article how to perform Check Disk on Cluster Shared Volume on StarWind VSAN with Failover Cluster ManagerSometimes, you can see an error in Failover Cluster Manager as “Chkdsk scan needed on volume”. It might happen due to some potential problems on a disk. To fix the issue, the system advices you to run a Chkdsk which is the well-known command for every system administrator.

Previously, we went through the Storage Spaces configuration journey. The latest step was the creation of the storage pool and the virtual disk. Today I would like to proceed from that point on and create Highly Available (HA) devices with VSAN from StarWind on Storage Spaces as an underlying storage. The main goal of this post is to run the performance tests of StarWind Highly Available (HA) devices located on Storage Spaces created in different ways (Simple and Mirror). StarWind HA devices will be mirrored between two hosts via a 40Gbps synchronization channel.

At Microsoft Build 2017, the Nested Virtualization support in Azure has been announced. Now you can enable nested virtualization using the Dv3 and Ev3 VM sizes – not a wide variety, but Microsoft is going to expand the support for more VM sizes in the upcoming months.

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.