Unable to retrieve all data needed to run the wizard. Error details: “Cannot retrieve information from server “Node A”. Error occurred during enumeration of SMB shares: The WinRM protocol operation failed due to the following error: The WinRM client sent a request to an HTTP server and got a response saying the requested HTTP URL was not available. This is usually returned by a HTTP server that does not support the WS-Management protocol.

Posted on January 28, 2014 by workinghardinit

I was recently configuring a Windows Server 2012 File server cluster to provide SMB transparent failover with continuous available file shares for end users. So, we’re not talking about a Scale Out File Server here.

All seemed to go pretty smooth until we hit a problem. when the role is running on Node A and you are using the GUI on Node A this is what you see:

When you try to add a share you get this

"Unable to retrieve all data needed to run the wizard. Error details: "Cannot retrieve information from server "Node A". Error occurred during enumeration of SMB shares: The WinRM protocol operation failed due to the following error: The WinRM client sent a request to an HTTP server and got a response saying the requested HTTP URL was not available. This is usually returned by a HTTP server that does not support the WS-Management protocol.”

When you failover the file server role to the other node, things seem to work just fine. So this is where you run the GUI from Node A while the file server role resides on Node B.

You can add a share, it all works. You notice the exact same behavior on the other node. So as long as the role is running on another node than the one on which you use Failover Cluster Manager you’re fine. Once you’re on the same node you run into this issue. So what’s going on?

So what to do? It’s related to WinRM so let’s investigate that.

So the WinRM config comes via a GPO. The local GPO for this is not configured. So that’s not the one, it must come from the domain.The IP addresses listed are the node IP and the two cluster networks. What’s not there is local host 127.0.0.1, the cluster IP address or any of the IPV6 addresses.

I experimented with a lot of settings. First we ended up creating an OU in the OU where the cluster nodes reside on which we blocked inheritance. We than ran gpupdate /target:computer /force on both nodes to make sure WinRM was no longer configure by the domain GPO. As the local GPO was not configured it reverted back to the defaults. The listener show up as listing to all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Nice but the GPO was now disabled.

This is interesting but, things still don’t work. For that we needed to disable/enable WinRM

Configure-SMRemoting -disable
Configure-SMRemoting –enable

or via server manager

That fixed it, and we it seems a necessity to to. Do note that to disable/enable remote management it should not be configured via a GPO or it throws an error like

Some more testing

We experimented by adding 127.0.0.0-172.0.0.1 an enabling the GPO again. We then saw the listener did show the local host, cluster & file role IP address but the issue was back. Using * in just IPv 4 did not do the trick either.

What did the trick was to use * in the filter for IPv 6 and keep our original filters on IPv4. The good news is that having removed the GPO and disabling/enabling WinRM the cluster IP address & Filer Role IP address are now in the list. That could be good for other use cases.

This is not ideal, but it all works now.

What we settled for

So we ended up with still restricting the GPO settings for IPv4 to subnet ranges and allowing * for IPv6. This made sure that even when we run the Failover Cluster Manager GUI from the node that owns the file server role everything still works.

One workaround is to work from a remote host, not from a cluster member, which is a good practice anyway.

The key takeaway is that when Microsoft says they test with IPv6 enabled they literally mean for everything.

Note

There is a TechNet article on WinRM GPO Settings for SCVMM 2012 RC where they advice to set both IPv4 and IPv6 to * to avoid issues with SCVMM operations. How to Add Trusted Hyper-V Hosts and Host Clusters in VMM

However, we found that IPv6 is the key requirement here, * for just IP4 alone did not work.

Where Does Storage QoS Live In Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V

Posted on January 16, 2014 by workinghardinit

Back to basics to explain where storage QoS lives and how it works

In Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V (and earlier) we have Hyper-V components called Virtualization Service Provider (VSP) and Virtualization Service Clients (VSC). In combination with the VMBUS the VSP and VSC components are what make virtualization perform well on Hyper-V.The Stor VSP/VSC are were the maximum IOPS functionality lives, aka as QoS Limit.

In a hosted hypervisor like Virtual PC or in a bare metal hypervisor without any “enlightment” the operating system inside a virtual machine is blissfully unaware of the fact it virtualized. Basically it sends hardware access requests using native drivers, but the requests are received by the virtual layer that intercepts them on behalf of the host OS by emulating hardware devices. This comes at a cost, namely performance, latency and losing device specific functionality.

In Hyper-V Microsoft provides the Integration Services (IS) for virtual machines running on Hyper-V which, in combination with the VMBus, avoids this overhead. So you should ways use them where and when possible. Two of the components in the IS are VSP and VSC. They are responsible for the communication between the Host OS or Parent Partition (where the VSP lives) and the Guest OS or Child Partition (where the VSC lives).

There are 4 VSP & VSC components: Network, Video, HID and Storage. As you probably guessed we’re interested in the storage VSP & VSC (storVSP.sys & storvsc.sys) for the discussion at hand. While the Stor VSP lives in the host OS and the Stor VSC in the guest OS of every VM running on the host they communicate over the VMBus we mentioned and is designed to make communications as fast as possible (it’s a communication protocol that runs in memory, i.e. it’s very fast).

The Minimum IOPS, also known as the Reserve is set per virtual disk but the threshold alerts for it are generated by the VHDMP. This is the VHD/VHDX parser and dependency property provider and this know all about the VHD/VHDX format with in itself is again a file on storage (DAS, CSV, SMB 3.0 File Share). This also happens to be where the Storage IO Balancer lives with which it collaborates, more on that below. You now see why QoS is not available for pass-through disk or iSCSI/FC storage in a VM, it requires a VHDX and is implemented at the virtual disk layer.

The QoS Limit (Maximum IOPS) is set at the virtual disk level via the Stor VSC and the Qos Limiter lives in the Stor VSP.

So what do we know:

QoS Limit (Maximum IOPS) and QoS reserve (Minimum IOPS) are implemented at the virtual disk layer. So per VHDX in a particular VM. It’s not available yet for shared VHDX, whether on the same host or not.

Unlike QoS Limit (Maximum IOPS), which is a hard cap, QoS reserve (Minimum IOPS) is a best effort not a hard minimum. It’s used to warn us, not as an enforcement. This works at the host level, where it will detect whether the VHDX can get get the minimum IOPS configured or not and can generate alerts if this happens. This tied to the QoS IO Balancer which is improved in R2 but it will still only spreads IOPS across multiple VMs on the same host, making sure they all get a fair share.

The key point here is that this process doesn’t work across multiple hosts in a cluster, over multiple clusters and stand alone member servers that might all be attached to the same storage system. Meaning that on shared, multi purpose storage we might have an issue. What if some VMs in a dedicated 4 node Hyper-V cluster dedicated to SQL Server virtualization is eating away all the IOPS. QoS IO Balancer will give each SQL Server VM a fair share of the IOPS but only within its host in that cluster. But if a VM on another host is consuming all IOPS, that’s out of it’s scope That’s where the max cap comes to the rescue (at the virtual disk level) if you need it. Nice but not perfect. You can see now why the storage QoS minimum is implemented at the VHDMP layer, as this which is where the IO Balancer also lives. The fairness that the IO Balancer gives you a better change that the minimal reserve might be met and if it doesn’t you’ll get notified (you need to listen an react, I hope that’s obvious).

Also don’t forget that if you still have other physical servers that run file services, SQL Server or some data crunching apps you will find that those are blissfully ignorant of your QoS IO Balancer at the Hyper-V host level and of your QoS at the Hyper-V virtual disk level.

There is no multiple host QoS, there is no cluster wide QoS and there is no storage wide QoS in Windows. Perhaps you have some QoS your SAN but most of the time this has no knowledge of Hyper-V, the cluster and the virtual machines.

So the above this gives you an idea where does Microsoft might focus it’s attention in regards to storage IOPS management (there are many more storage capabilities on my wish list) in vNext.

Any other options available today?

Other options are storage that is smart and has knowledge about the workload. This is nice but that means that it will come at a cost. For the moment GridStore with it’s virtual controller seems to be one of the better ones out there. Now I have heard people say Microsoft doesn’t get it and they’re doing do a bad job, but I do not agree. I have spoken to many people in the community and at MSFT and they have stated, even publicly, on stage, that they will keep investing in storage feature to enhance it in the versions to come. Take a look here at TechEd 2013 Session MDC-B345: Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Storage Performance.

Why would I like Microsoft to keep improving storage

When talking to storage vendors serving our needs, I always have some feedback. A lot of the advanced storage features don’t always work well in real life, especially if you combine a few. Don’t believe me? Talk to some experienced Windows engineers about the sorry state of many hardware VSS providers. Or how federation across storage systems falls apart the moment you combine it with application consistent snapshots or put a real heavy load on it. Not to cool when you paid for all those licenses which are tuned into “lab only” toys. Yes sometimes as a Windows user you feel like a second class citizen in storage land. A lot of storage systems are still very much a silo. Attempts to do storage federation without a hit on performance, making it load balance across SAN building blocks whilst making all the advanced features that have knowledge of the OS and hypervisor work reliably are not moving as fast as the race for ever more IOPS.

Sure I love the notion of 2 million IOPS, especially if you can get them with random write/read IO at super low latencies Smile . But there are other, sometimes more urgent needs and those seem to fall between the cracks as the storage vendors compete with each other and forget about the needs of their customers. If some storage vendors would shut up long enough to listen to customers they might be less surprised as to why those customers are interested in Storage Spaces.

So it would be kind of nice if Microsoft can work on this an include more evolved storage QoS capabilities in the box. I also like that approach for other reasons. Basically we will do everything we can with what Windows offers us inbox. It’s cost effective as long as you keep the KISS principle in mind and design it consciously. I assure you that often too much money is spent on 3rd party software because people don’t leverage what they have in box and drop the 20/80 rule. We do and you get the best TCO/ROI for our licenses possible. We don’t spend extra money on licenses, integration and support of third party products so we can spend it where it matters the most. It also makes upgrades easier as the complexity and the number of dependencies are lower on pure in box solution.On top of that we minimalize the distinct possibility that one or more 3rd party products will hold us hostage in an older infrastructure because they don’t support new versions of Windows fast, good and complete enough for us to upgrade.

How To Monitor Storage QoS Minimum IOPS & Identify VM & The Virtual Hard Disk In Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V

Posted on January 13, 2014 by workinghardinit

At TechEd 2013 John Matthew & Liang Yang presented following session MDC-B345: Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Storage Performance. That was a great one. During this they demonstrated the use of WMI to monitor storage alerts related to Storage QoS in Windows Server 2012 R2. We’re going to go further, dive in a bit deeper and show you how to identify the virtual hard disk and the virtual machine.

One important thing in all this is that we need to have the reserve or minimum IOPS not being met, so we run IOMeter to make sure that’s the case. That way the events we need will be generated. It’s a bit of a tedious exercise.

So we start with a wmi notification query, this demonstrates that notifications are sent when the minimum IOPS cannot be met. The query is simply:

select * from Msvm_StorageAlert

instance of Msvm_StorageAlert
{
    AlertingManagedElement = "\\TESTHOST01\root\virtualization\v2:Msvm_ResourcePool.InstanceID="Microsoft:70BB60D2-A9D3-46AA-B654-3DE53004B4F8"";
    AlertType = 3;
    Description = "Hyper-V Storage Alert";
    EventTime = "20140109114302.000000-000";
    IndicationTime = "20140109114302.000000-000";
    Message = "The ‘Primordial’ Hard Disk Image pool has degraded Quality of Service. One or more Virtual Hard Disks allocated from the pool is not reporting sufficient throughput as specified by the IOPSReservation property in its Resource Allocation Setting Data.";
    MessageArguments = {"Primordial"};
    MessageID = "32930";
    OwningEntity = "Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-VMMS";
    PerceivedSeverity = 3;
    ProbableCause = 50;
    ProbableCauseDescription = "One or more VHDs allocated from the pool (identified by value of AlertingManagedElement property) is experiencing insufficient throughput and is not able to meet its configured IOPSReservation.";
    SystemCreationClassName = "Msvm_ComputerSystem";
    SystemName = "TESTHOST01";
    TIME_CREATED = "130337413826727692";
};

That’s great, but what virtual hard disk of what VM is causing this? That’s the question we’ll dive into in this blog. Let’s go. On MSDN docs on Msvm_StorageAlert class we read:

Remarks

The Hyper-V WMI provider won’t raise events for individual virtual disks to avoid flooding clients with events in case of large scale malfunctions of the underlying storage systems.

When a client receives an Msvm_StorageAlert event, if the value of the ProbableCause property is 50 (“Storage Capacity Problem“), the client can discover which virtual disks are operating outside their QoS policy by using one of these procedures:

Query all the Msvm_LogicalDisk instances that were allocated from the resource pool for which the event was generated. These Msvm_LogicalDisk instances are associated to the resource pool via the Msvm_ElementAllocatedFromPool association.
Filter the result list by selecting instances whose OperationalStatus contains “Insufficient Throughput”.

So I query (NOT a notification query!) the Msvm_ElementAllocatedFromPool class, click through on a result and select Show MOF.

Let’s look at that MOF …In yellow is the GUID of our VM ID. Hey cool!

instance of Msvm_ElementAllocatedFromPool
{
Antecedent = "\\TESTHOST01\root\virtualization\v2:Msvm_ProcessorPool.InstanceID="Microsoft:B637F347-6A0E-4DEC-AF52-BD70CB80A21D"";
Dependent = "\\TESTHOST01\root\virtualization\v2:Msvm_Processor.CreationClassName="Msvm_Processor",DeviceID="Microsoft:b637f346-6a0e-4dec-af52-bd70cb80a21d\\6",SystemCreationClassName="Msvm_ComputerSystem",SystemName="96CD7F7E-0C0A-42FE-96CB-B5550D937F27"";
};

Now we want to find the virtual hard disk in question! So let’s do what the docs says and query Msvn_LogicalDisk based on the VM GUID we find the relates results …

Look we got OperationalStatus 32788 which means InsufficientThroughput, cool we’re on the right track … now we need to find what virtual disk of our VM that is. Well in the above MOF we find the device ID: DeviceID = "Microsoft:5F6D764F-1BD4-4C5D-B473-32A974FB1CA2\\L"

Well if we then do a query for Msvm_StorageAllocationSettingData we find two entrties for our VM GUID (it has two disks) and by looking at the value InstanceID that contains the above DeviceID we find the virtual hard disk info we needed to identify the one not getting the minimum IOPS.

HostResource = {"C:\ClusterStorage\Volume5\DidierTest01\Virtual Hard Disks\DidierTest01Disk02.vhdx"};
HostResourceBlockSize = NULL;
InstanceID = "Microsoft:96CD7F7E-0C0A-42FE-96CB-B5550D937F27\5F6D764F-1BD4-4C5D-B473-32A974FB1CA2\\L";

Are you tired yet? Do you realize you need to do this while the disk IOPS is not being met to see the events. This is no way to it in production. Not on a dozen servers, let alone on a couple of hundred to thousands or more hosts is it? All the above did was give us some insight on where and how. But using wbemtest.exe to diver deeper into wmi notifications/events isn’t really handy in real life. Tools will need to be developed to deal with this larger deployments. The can be provided by your storage vendor, your VAR, integrator or by yourself if you’re a large enough shop to make private cloud viable or if you are the cloud provider Smile .

To give you an idea on how this can be done there is some demo code on MSDN over here and I have that compiled for demo purposes.

We have 4 VMs running on the host. One of them is being hammered by IOMeter while it’s minimum IOPS have been set to an number it cannot possibly get. We launch StorageQos to monitor our Hyper-V host.

Just let it run and when the notification event that the minimum IOPS cannot be delivered on the storage this monitor will query WMI further to tell us what virtual disk or disks are involved. Cool huh! A good naming convention can help identify the VM and this tools works remotely against node so you can launch one for each node of the cluster. Time to fire up Visual Studio 2013 me thinks or go and chat to a good dev you might know to take this somewhere, some prefer this sort of work to the modern day version of CRUD apps any day. If you buy monitoring tools you might want them to have this capability.

While this is just demo code, it gives you an idea of how tools and solutions can be developed & build to monitor the Minimum IOPS part of Storage QoS in Windows Server 2012 R2. Hope you found this useful!

Use Cases For Fluid Cache For SAN With DELL Compellent In High Performance Virtualization With Windows 2012 R2

Posted on January 10, 2014 by workinghardinit

Fluid Cache For SAN

At Dell World 2013 in Austin Texas I spent some time talking to engineers & managers about Fluid Cache For SAN. The demo in the keynote was enough to grab my distinct attention, especially as a Compellent customer.

What is it?

Dell already has Fluid Cache for DAS available in its PowerEdge servers. Now it’s time to bring this to their best SAN offering, the Compellent, and make Fluid Cache shared storage suitable for shared storage clustering. The way to do that cost effective and high performance is to build on the success of on board (local to the server) high performance storage and make that shared through software in a physical shared nothing replication/sync model. To make this happen they use a 10/40Gbps Ethernet solution leveraging RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet). Yes that very technology I have been investing time & effort in for SMB Direct and which we leverage for CSV & Live Migration traffic and with SOFS in Windows 2012 R2.

Basically the super low latency an high throughput enable the memory to be synced across all nodes in a cluster and as such each node sees all the cluster memory. For redundancy you will need at least 3 nodes in a cluster. Dell will scale Fluid Cache For SAN to 128 nodes. Windows Server 2012 R2 can handle 64 nodes, which some think is ridiculously high, but then again, Dell aims even higher so it’s not as weird as you think. Some people have really huge computing needs. Just remember that 10 years ago you probably found that 16GB of RAM was extravagant.

Why this architecture?

Dell uses server based “shared nothing flash storage” & high speed low, latency synchronization to create a logical cluster wide shared pool of flash memory. This means the achieve stellar low latency as the flash storage is inside of the servers, close to the processors and as such delivers excellent performance for the workloads. Way better that “just” flash only SAN can. For data integrity they commit the data only when it written to the Express Flash drive(s) of one server and then also to another and verified. This needs to happen very fast and that where the RoCE network come sin to play. Later, at less speed critical times the data is pushed out to the Compellent SAN for storage. If that SAN is a flash based setup think about the capabilities this gives you in performance. Likewise data reads of the SAN that are highly active are pushed from the Compellent SAN and cached (also in multiple copies) on the Express Flash modules. While two servers with each a copy of the data on Express Flash modules would suffice DELL requires at least three. This is just a plain common sense N+1 redundancy design to have high availability even when a node fails. A cool think to note is that you can build larger clusters with 3 nodes each having one or more Express Flash modules and additional nodes don’t need it as long as they can read the cache of those 3. So the cost of this can be managed. The drawback is that you don’t read & write to a local Express Flash module on those extra node. If you want that you’ll need to put more $ on the table.

The thing to note here is that the Servers/SAN are connected over RoCE/RDMA. Well this look familiar. What technology can also leverages RDMA? SMB Direct in Windows Server 2012 R2! And where do we use this amongst other things? Storage IO in Scale Out File Server, CSV traffic, Live Migration …

The big benefit of this design it just it takes your SAN to the next level but also, if DELL does this right, they won’t break any of the good stuff like VSS aware snapshot with Replay Manager, Automatic Data Tiering, Live Volumes, Live Migration etc. A lot of the high IOPS/low latency solutions out their based on fast local flash break a lot of the good stuff and reduces centralized storage management. What if you can have your cookie and eat it to?

Demo Time at Dell World

Dell demonstrated an Oracle database load on an eight node cluster of PowerEdge R720 servers with Intel Xeon E5 processors, with Linux (no Windows Server 2012 R2 support yet ) These servers each used 350GB PCI-Express flash cards (“only” PCI-Express 2.0 capable by the way). This cluster, using a Compellent SAN, managed to get a result of more than 5 million IOPS at 6 millisecond response times, delivering 12,000 tps for 14,000 client connections. This was read only. If they dropped the Fluid Cache for SAN they could “only” achieve 2,000 clients (6 times less clients due to 4 time less transactions and 99% slower responses). See this movie for more info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw7UHWWAtig and watch the keynote from Dell World 2013 here

Where would I use this?

Cost will determine use cases and this is unknown for now. We can only look at what Fluid Cache for DAS cost right now and speculate. I for one hope/bet on the fact that DELL won’t price itself out of the marked (they have a lot of competition from big & smalls players in a “good enough is good enough” world with a cloud mindset all around). So make it too expensive and we might be happy with “just” 500.000 IOPS at much less cost. It’s a fine line. Price it right, support it well and you might win the bulk of sales in the storage wars. Based on the DAS solution we’re looking at least 8000 $ per server (license is 3500 for DAS => see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/05/dell_fluid_cache_server_acceleration/ + cost of PCI-Express flash module (> 5000$ => see http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/extras/chats/w/wiki/4480.3-5-2013-techchat-fluid-cache-for-das.aspx) & yearly maintenance fee. Then we need to factor in the cost of the RDMA/RoCE capable NICs & the (dedicated) Force10 switches – 2 for redundancy that are at least 10Gbps (S4810?) or probably 40Gbps (S6000?) & cabling. So this is not a cheap solution and you won’t just “throw it in” on a quiet afternoon to see what it does for you. Not that there will be a DIY “throw it on kit” I think, it’s a step above plug and play. If they keep it affordable and do some other things for Windows Server 201 R2 / Hyper-V they can be the absolute number one SAN vendor for any Microsoft customer. But that’s another blog topic.

Cost is indeed something that might make it a show stopper for us. I just can’t tell yet. One of the key factors is that if affordable it could give the point solutions we now see pop up more and more in storage. a run for their money. While cheap and workable in good enough is good enough scenarios it takes some of the centrally shared storage advantages away. But if we ever do a state full VDI project in an environment with high end physical desktops (500GB or more local storage, SSD disks, 8 core CPU, 8-32GB DDR3, dual or more screens) that run ArcGis, AutoCad, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Outlook with 5GB mailboxes, large documents & huge files (images) this might be the enabler we need to make VDI happen & works as desired with current all-purpose Compellent SANs. IIf the price is right it could enable VDI in now “NO GO” scenarios. And those are plentiful, … Another use case I see is a virtualized SQL Server environment on Hyper-V with general purpose shared storage. We’re doing very well but the day might arrive that we need those IOPS in order to take it even further. Don’t laugh but realize how much IOPS an SSD delivers to a workstation today and that’s what your users expect & demand. Want to fail at VDI? Have it outperformed by a 4 year old physical PC where you slapped an SSD into.

Could it help in keeping excessive IOPS away from the SAN, making that capable of doing more over a longer life time? In other words can it play a part in the Storage QoS issue across server/cluster/storage system issue for non workload aware storage solutions?

So I might have some homework to do. For our next SQL Server cluster we’ll look at the next generation of servers & start counting our PCI Express slots. We now already consume 4 PCI-Express slots for 2*FC & 2*Dual Port 10Gbps) in our Hyper-V design. That’s another discussion, but they are built purposely for performance under any condition & to be highly redundant. A health check / improvement track by Microsoft for our SQL Server environment has proven this to be an outstanding setup (nice e-mail to see your bosses get by the way). I digress, free PCI-Slots should not be an issue, as we also don’t need the FC cards in the Fluid Cache Nodes. The storage IO uses the RoCE network, to which the Compellent SAN attaches.

Cost is very important in determining if we’ll ever get to deploy it. The cloud is here, and while that is far from cheap either, it’s a lot easier to sell than internal IT for various reasons. That’s just how the powers that be roll right now & how things are.

What we’ll get in our hands

There was a lot of love between Dell & Samsung at Dell World. Talking to Dell at the server/storage/networking boots I understood that Samsung is going to produce flash modules for this that support PCI-Express 3.0 and the industry backed NVM Express host interface for solid state drives which will reduce latency with 1/3 compared to now. As it seems they will produce higher capacity cards than what was used in the demos (800 GB and 1.6 TB). So capacity will increase & latency will drop even more. They leverage the Force10 10Gpbs or 40Gbps switches for the RoCE network. As Dell & Mellanox are cooperating heavily (Mellanox Collaborates with Dell to Deliver 10/40GbE Solution for Mainstream Servers and Networking Solutions) my bet is on Mellanox for the cards. Broadcom is not there yet for it to happen in time and Intel has no RoCE cards afaik. They seem to be playing the waiting game before they jump in.

Magic Ball Time, Speculation & Questions.

I’m not a DELL Server / Storage designer or architect, and those that are don’t tell me to plaster it all over the internet, so this really is magic ball time …

I’ll show my ignorance on what Samsung does under the hood when I hear that the next generation of DELL servers can have 6TB of RAM I can only speculate that with the advent of DDR4 in servers & ever dropping cost the path is open to leverage NV-RAM disk for the read/write cache in Fluid Cache for SAN as well a bit like what IDT did http://us.generation-nt.com/idt-announces-world-first-pci-express-gen-3-nvme-nv-dram-press-3732872.html. The persistence comes from writing the DRAM content to NAND at shutdown, can we do that fast enough at 1.6 TB sized caches? Can we fit enough of those modules on a card? What would that do for IOPS & latency? Does that even make sense at this moment in time?

What if we could leverage the DDR4 dims in the server itself? This would perhaps cut costs and also save us some valuable PCI-Express 3.0 slots for our 10Gbps or better addiction Smile . Sure there is no persistence than but the content is distributed redundantly over the cluster anyway? Is that safe enough to make it feasible? What if we need to shut down the cluster? I guess it’s not that easy and perhaps we just need to make sure future motherboards have 8 or more PC-Express 3.0 slots & not worry about that. Or move to 40/100Gbps & have less need for NICs. Yeah that’s what was said of 10Gbps in the early days …

Support for Windows?

While it’s not there yet I have absolutely no doubt that they will bring it to Windows Server 2012 R2 and higher. Well Windows is a huge on premise market for native workloads like SQL Server, VDI and Hyper-V. The number of sales opportunities in the Microsoft ecosystem is growing (despite cloud) while others are stagnant or dropping. On top of that the low cost of Hyper-V leaves money to be spent on Fluid Cache for SAN. As Dell is in business to make money, they will not leave that big chunk of cash on the table.

When can we get our hands on this technology?

Timing wise that will be early to late Q2 in 2014, which is my best guestimate. Interesting times people, interesting times

Working Hard In IT

My view on IT from the trenches

Category Archives: Windows Server 2012 R2