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Tag: windows-server

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Oksana Zybinskaya
  • Oksana Zybinskaya
  • July 21, 2016

VMware’s EVO:RAIL fail as a lesson for Microsoft’s Azure Stack

As we know, VMware’s first attempt in the field of hyperconvergence, the EVO:RAIL, was a good quality software product set, which nevertheless failed because of the licensing policy. Specifically, it demanded that buyers acquire new vSphere licences, with no exception for existing vSphere users who liked the idea of adopting hyperconverged infrastructure.
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Oksana Zybinskaya
  • Oksana Zybinskaya
  • June 21, 2016

BadTunnel Bug, which Hijacks Network Traffic and Affects All Windows Versions, has been patched by Microsoft

The works of Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, have helped Microsoft to patch a significant security issue in its implementation of the NetBIOS protocol that affected all Windows existing versions. It was found out that the attacker can exploit this vulnerability to pass as a WPAD or ISATAP server and redirect all the victim’s network traffic through a point controlled by the attacker. Network traffic here means not just Web HTTP and HTTPS, but also OS updates, software upgrades, Certificate Revocation List updates via Microsoft’s Crypto API, and other OS maintenance operations.
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Anton Kolomyeytsev
  • Anton Kolomyeytsev
  • May 11, 2016

Storage Replica: Overview

Here is an overview dedicated to disaster recovery, more specific, it’s about the DR capabilities of Microsoft Storage Replica – a new feature of Windows Server 2016. It takes a glance on the DR process itself and then brings a few details of the Storage Replica operation, its features, and peculiarities. They include zero data loss, block-level replication, simple deployment and management, guest and host, SMB3 protocol, high security, high performance, consistency groups, user delegation, network constraint, thin provisioning, etc. The post is, basically, an introduction to a series of experiments also listed on the blog. They were conducted in order to check the functionality and performance of Microsoft Storage Replica in different use cases.
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Vladan Seget
  • Vladan Seget
  • May 10, 2016

Windows Server 2016 – Three Built-in Tools To Protect Your Data From Ransomware

While the Windows Server 2016 “Technical Preview (TP) 5 has had the option for restoring data via System Restore protection, Microsoft did not keep this option in the final release. As such, we have only two built-in options. After spyware and malware IT administrators do have to face another threat – A Ransomware. You have to pay to recover your data that has been encrypted by malware. Clever move from the Pirate’s perspective. Indeed. Pirates are hoping that they can make some dirty money out of it. And sometimes they’re successful. You might be asking what can you do, as a system administrator, to protect yourself against ransomware?
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Vladan Seget
  • Vladan Seget
  • March 2, 2016

Deploy MSI package to group of computers in your domain

This is a follow up post on a post we have done previously – How To Convert EXE To MSI Package In 5 Easy Steps – where we created a MSI package for an application that did not exists as MSI, so we had no choice. We used third party software to repackage our application.
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Anton Kolomyeytsev
  • Anton Kolomyeytsev
  • December 9, 2014

Windows Server: Soft Restart

There is a new feature in Windows Server from Microsoft, called Soft Restart. The idea itself is perfect, because its goal is to minimize downtime during reboot process. While it is possible to reduce software starting sequence time, when starting the hardware there are physical time limits. These limits made it impossible to reduce reboot time, before Microsoft thought about the “soft restart”. It is claimed to perform standard reboot without restarting the devices, basically resetting only software and reducing the required time dramatically. StarWind engineers decided to check if Soft Restart works fine in two use cases – with a simple physical setup and with virtualized infrastructure. As it always goes with our practical approach, the fool experiment complete with screenshots is in the post.
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Anton Kolomyeytsev
  • Anton Kolomyeytsev
  • October 29, 2014

Storage Replica: “Shared Nothing” Hyper-V HA VM Cluster

This post is dedicated to the new solution from Microsoft – the Microsoft Storage Replica. It is a practical part of a series of posts about this technology and features a “Shared Nothing” Hyper-V HA VM Cluster in practice. Microsoft Storage Replica is designed to perform replication between various media: servers, clusters, volumes inside a server, etc. It’s typical usage scenario is Disaster Recovery, which is essential for data protection in case anything happens to the main location. Critical data is replicated to a remote site, often located hundreds and thousands of miles away for better data safety. The experiment is performed by StarWind engineers, so the post contains detailed instructions and a comprehensive conclusion.
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