Category Archives: Windows Server 2012

KB3058168: Update that enables Windows 8.1 and Windows 8 KMS hosts to activate Windows 10

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Unless you’re living under a rock you will know that Windows 10 will be available on July 29th 2015. Microsoft has prepared for this by already making an Update that enables Windows 8.1 and Windows 8 KMS hosts to activate a “later version of Windows”. This must mean Windows 10. I do not know if this means that even the versions after Windows 10 will be activated by a KMS server running this update but it might.

Select the version you need for the KMS server or servers you use and install them.

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Launch the update by launching Windows8.1-KB3058168-x64.msu

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Click “Yes” to install the update

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Install the update

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Restart the KMS Server

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So there you go, you’re ready to to start deploying Windows 10 Enterprise edition which can then be activated by your KMS server when the new client OS is generally available. Good luck.

Closing note: Don’t even bother posting comments where you ask for KMS Server keys or MAK keys for Windows 10. As I’ve stated before, while it might be more fun to join the pirates we’re the navy and as such we don’t condone piracy Winking smile. Got it? GOOD!

Windows Deduplication And Mysterious Folder & File Sizes

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There was a brief moment of “this can’t be good” the sys admin looked at the file size of the backup folders and compared it to the size reported for the files. Sure I had told him that Windows inbox deduplication rocked but this had to be too good to be true or deduplication had just eaten all the backup files and he was “toast”. It was neither. But that requires some explanation. The good news is that Windows Data Deduplication combined with a backup product that supports it like VEEAM will save you a ton of money on deduplication licenses some charge and storage costs.

This is what he saw, and what caused the raised eye brow. 12.4TB reduced to 285GB.

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Deduplication can’t be that great, right? Did something go wrong? Checking the properties of ALL selected files themselves did not report anything else but compared to the volume info for used space something seems very wrong. That’s supposed to be 5.34 TB.

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The volume properties report the effective spaces consumed on the volume, so that reflects the true deduplication results. You can confirm this with PowerShell

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A savings rate of 57% and  5.34 TB of actually consumes space (5880575557632 bytes) and an unoptimized size of 12.4 TB.  Just as server manager reports.

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So what is explorer up to at the folder and file level? Nothing, it just can’t show you the complete picture. Windows Data Deduplication stores duplicated chunks into the System Volume Information folder. Windows explorer runs under your account and has no access to that folder and doesn’t report the size of all chunks in there. The only thing it does reports are the non duplicated bits that are left in the source folder. In our case where the backups reside. The result is, as said, raised eyebrows.

The same is true for any other tool actually, like WinDirStat in the blow screenshot.

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When we run this tools as system we get a different picture and you can navigate to the actual ChunkStore and learn more about the internals.

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Presenting at ITProceed 2015 & E2EVC 2015 Berlin on SMB Direct

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You cannot afford to ignore SMB3 and it’s capabilities related to storage traffic such as multichannel, RDMA and encryption. SMB Direct over RoCE seems to have a bright future as it continuous to evolve and improve in Windows Server 2106. The need for DCB (PFC and optionally ETS) intimidates some people. But it should not.

I’ll be putting SMB Direct & RoCE into perspective at ITPROCEED | Welcome to THE IT Pro Event of the year! and #E2EVC E2EVC 2015 Berlin, June 12-14, 2015 Berlin, Germany, sharing experiences, tips and demos!  Come see PFC & ETS in action and learn what it can do for you. Storage vendors should most certainly consider supporting all features of SMB 3 natively as a competitive advantage. So Join me for the talk “SMB Direct – The Secret Decoder Ring”.

All these talks are at extremely affordable community driven events to make sure you can attend. The sessions are given by speakers who do this for the community (speakers and attendees do this in their own time and pay for their our own travel/expenses) and who work with these technology in real life and provide feedback to vendors on the issues or opportunities we see. This makes the sessions very interesting and anything but marketing, slide ware or sales pitches. See you there!

Jumbo Frame Settings & Slow or Failing Live Migrations over SMB Direct

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The Problem

I recently had to trouble shoot a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster where SMB Direct is leveraged for live migration. It seemed to work, sometime perfectly but at times it but it was in “slow” motion. The VMs got queued for live migration, it took some time for it started and sometimes it would finish or it would fail. This did not happen between all the nodes. I diligently checked out the SMB Direct network but that was OK on all nodes. Basically the LM network was perfectly fine.

To me this indicated that the hosts potentially had issues communicating with each other to coordinate the live migration. But pings and such looked good, there was connectivity, on the surface all seemed well.  In the event log details we saw indications that this was indeed the case. Unfortunately I did not get the opportunity to take screenshots or copies of the events in this particular situation.

The nodes had a separate 2*1Gbps native team LAN access and backups. But diving deeper I noticed that they had set Jumbo Frames on some of those member NICs and not on others. So these setting differed from node to node and that was leading to the symptoms we described above.

Conclusion

You can use Jumbo Frames on your live migration network. Testing has shown this to be beneficial. When you’re doing SMB direct it won’t make such a big difference but it doen not hurt. When SMB Direct fails you’ll fall back to SMB with Multichannel and there it helps more! See Live Migration Can Benefit From Jumbo Frames. While SMB Direct (infiniband, RoCE & iWarp) know Jumbo frames the limited testing I have ever done there indicates only a small increase (2%) in throughput so I’m not sure it’s even worthwhile when doing RDMA.

When you can use Jumbo Frames on you host LAN NIC or team of NICs (handy is you use it to do backups as well)  you need to be consistent end to end. Meaning ALL hosts, ALL NICS & all switches/ switch ports. Being inconsistent in this on the cluster nodes  was what cause the slow to failing live migrations. You need to have good communications between the hosts themselves and AD. Just unplug the LAN from a Hyper-V cluster host to demo this => live migration from to that node and the rest of the cluster won’t work. Mismatching Jumbo Frames or potentially other network settings make this less obvious.  Another “fun” example to trouble shoot is a NIC team where the member NICs are in different VLANs.