Category Archives: SOFS

July 2016 update rollup for Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2

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Microsoft recently released another update rollup (aka cumulative update). The

July 2016 update rollup for Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2.

This rollup includes improvements and fixes but more importantly it also contains ‘improvements’ from June 2016 update rollup KB3161606 and May 2016 update rollup KB3156418. When it comes to the June rollup KB3161606 it’s fixes the bugs that cause concerns with Hyper-V Integration Components (IC) to even serious down time to Scale Out File Server (SOFS) users. My fellow MVP Aidan Finn discuses this in this blog post. Let’s say it caused a wrinkle in the community.

In short with KB3161606 the Integration Components needed an upgrade (to 6.3.9600.18339) but due to a mix up with the manifest files this failed. You could leave them in pace but It’s messy. To make matters worse this cumulative update also messed up SOFS deployments which could only be dealt with by removing it.

Bring in update rollup 3172614. This will install on hosts and guest whether they have  already installed or not and it fixes these issues. I have now deployed it on our infrastructure and the IC’s updated successfully to 6.3.9600.18398. The issues with SOFS are also resolved with this update. We have not seen any issues so far.

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In short, CU should be gone from Windows Update and WSUS. It it was already installed you don’t need to remove it. CU will install on those servers (hosts and guests) and this time is does things right.

I hope this leads to better QA in Redmond as it really is causing a lot of people grief at the moment. It also feed conspiracy nuts theories that MSFT is sabotaging on-premises to promote Azure usage even more. Let’s not feed the trolls shall we?

SOFS / SMB 3 Offers Best VM Resiliency Experience

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I have blogged about Virtual Machine Resiliency in Windows 2016 Failover Clustering before in Testing Virtual Machine Compute Resiliency in Windows Server 2016 

Those test and demos were done with block lever storage, CSV on Fibre Channel, iSCSI or shared SAS. Today we’ll look at the experience when you’re running your VMs on a continually available file share on a Scale Out File Server (SOFS). This configuration offers the best possible experience.

Why well, when the cluster node is in Isolated mode this has no impact on the SOFS share as this is a resource external to the Hyper-V cluster. In other words it remains on line. This means that the VMs, even if they have lost their high availability during the time the node is Isolated, they keep running. After all there is nothing wrong with Hyper-V itself. With block level CSV storage you lose access to the storage as that a cluster resource and the node got isolated. That’s why the VMs go into a paused critical state during a transient failure with block level storage but they don’t when you’re using SOFS.

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The virtual machine compute resiliency feature in action shows you that the VMs service a transient failure without issues. Your services need never know something was up. Even when the transient failure is reoccurring that doesn’t mean it will cause down time. The node will be quarantined and if it come backup the workload will be live migrated away.

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You can watch a video of this in action here on Vimeo:

The quarantine threshold and duration as well as the resiliency period and can be tweaked to your environment to get the best possible results.

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SMB 3 for the win! This is yet one more convincing argument to start looking into SOFS and leveraging the capabilities of SMB3. Remember that you can run as SOFS cluster against your existing shared storage to get started if you can get the IOPS/latency you require. But also look into storage spaces, especially storage spaces direct which avoids some of the drawback SANs have in such a scenario. High time for storage vendors to really scale out, implement SMB 3 well and complete and keep the great added value features they already have in their offering. It’s this or becoming yet a bit more irrelevant in todays storage scene in the Microsoft ecosystem.