Category Archives: Windows Server 2016

SOFS / SMB 3 Offers Best VM Resiliency Experience

Posted on by
2

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.

image

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.

image

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.

image

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.

Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany

Posted on by
Reply

On Thursday May 12th 2016 the inaugural edition of the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany was held in Dusseldorf. The new conference is the result of a long time wish and dream of the driving force behind the organization of it, Carsten Rachfahl from Rachfahl IT Solutions. When Carsten asked me to come over to speak and attend I was on board and I got the honor of presenting on what’s new and enhanced in Failover Clustering In Windows Server 2016.

CDCSpaking

The conference surpassed all expectations. The organization was impeccable. Just like the supporting infrastructure for speakers and sponsors, which was top notch. Catering was probably one of the best I’ve ever seen at a conference. All of this helped make the goal of the conference, presenting valuable information to the attendees and provide for networking opportunities, a success.

The quality of the speakers and the content of the sessions was matched by the interest and enthusiasm of the attendees for the technologies presented. It was a perfect fit. This was made possible by Carsten his vision on what he considers to be a great conference. This vision was brought to live by the hard work of his company co-workers, with the aid of the sponsors, the speakers and the trust of the attendees had in this conference for them to spend their time and money to attend.

As a speaker and attendee it was a great experience. The support was excellent and even the PowerPoint template was easy to use and clear of superfluous clutter. We got everything we needed to present in perfect conditions to a receptive audience. The mood was a happy one. People were having a good time, learning and networking all day long.

CDCGermanySpeakers

To Carsten and team: well done and thank you! I’m looking forward to attending and speaking again next year as this conference is a new gem to the IT public in the DACH region.

Carsten has built his company Rachfahl IT-Solutions into one of, if not the very best, experts in regards to Hyper-V, Storage Spaces, Windows and Private Cloud  in Germany. They share this expertise through their community efforts. Great people to work with!

Simplified SMB Multichannel and Multi-NIC Cluster Networks

Posted on by
11

Simplified SMB Multichannel and Multi-NIC Cluster Networks

One of the seemingly small feature enhancements in Windows Server 2016 Failover clustering is simplified SMB multichannel and multi-NIC cluster networks. In Windows 2016 failover clustering now recognizes and uses multiple NICs on the same subnet for cluster networking (Cluster & client access).

image

Why was this introduced?

The growth in the capabilities of the hardware ( Compute, memory, storage & networking) meant that failover clustering had to leverage this capability more easily and for more use cases than before. Talking about SMB, that now also is used for not “only” CSV and live migration but also for Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Replica.

  • It gives us better utilization of the network capabilities and throughput with Storage Spaces Direct, CSV, SQL, Storage Replica etc.
  • Failover clustering now works with multichannel as any other workload without the extra requirement of needing multiple subnets. This is more important that it seems to me at first. But in many environment getting another VLAN and/or extra subnet is a hurdle. Well that hurdle has gone.
  • For IPv6 Link local Subnets it just works, these are auto configured as cluster only networks.
  • The cluster Validation wizard won’t nag about it anymore and knows it’s a valid failover cluster configuration

See it in action!

You can find a quick demo of simplified SMB multichannel and multi-NIC cluster networks on my Vimeo channel here

image

In this video I demo 2 features. One is new and that is virtual machine compute resiliency. The other is an improved feature, simplified SMB multichannel and multi NIC cluster networks. The Multichannel demo is the first part of the video. Yes, it’s with RDMA RoCEv2, you know I just have to do SMB Direct when I can!

You can read more about simplified SMB multichannel and multi-NIC cluster networks on TechNet in here. Happy Reading!

Get-VMHostSupportedVersion

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote about this little Gem of a PowerShell Commandlet  Get-VMHostSupportedVersion before in here (there a bit more info on the impact of a VM configuration version in that blog). Now at TPv5 I took a new peak and what do we find?

image

We now have version virtual machine configuration version 7.1 at TPv5. We also got 2 new version ID’s 254.0 for Prerelease and 255.0 for Experimental. Clearly Microsoft has plans here.  I’ll update this blog with a link to the documentation when I find it.

All bets are open as to where we’ll land at RTM for the virtual machine configuration version. I’m guessing that we’re feature complete at Technical Preview 5 but version numbers can get funky. Will all TP version be supported at RTM? Normally upgrades from beta / preview versions are not supported but on the other hand some people in early adopter programs are working on it already so I’m guessing they will. We’ll see, but that’s where I put my money.