Great news for all those of us that are running Windows Server Technical Preview v1 in their labs. It was due to expire on April 15th but Microsoft announced they were working on a fix to extend that deadline. They did not mention an ETA for it bit it’s here now, see http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46447
So download, install, reboot and you’re good to go until we get our hands on Technical Preview v2! We’ve been saved by the cavalry and life is good!
We finally go to make a next “Hyper-V Amigos Showcast”, due to very busy schedules we had to postpone this a couple of times. But we made it! In this Episode (the 8th one) Carsten and I show one application of a new great feature in Windows Server vNext: Storage Replication. This allows us to replicate a volume between two storage systems without caring what that storage system is as long a you have windows volumes on it. Replication can be synchronous or asynchronous and there are multiple scenarios in which to use this.
Here we focus on trying out replication between two clusters or in a stretched cluster scenario. I have already made a video demonstrating server to server replication. In this showcast we demonstrate the Stretched Cluster scenario (and troubleshoot our own lab).
More info is available here:
Enjoy and see you next time!
Carsten Rachfahl from Rachfahl IT-Solutions (quite possibly Germany’s leading Hyper-V, Storage Spaces & Private cloud consultancy) and I got together in Berlin last November at the Microsoft Technical Summit 2014. Between presenting (I delivered What’s new in Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012 R2), workshops, interviews we found some time to do a video interview.
We discussed a very welcome new capability in Windows Server vNext: “Rolling cluster updates” or “Cluster Operating System Rolling Upgrade” in Windows Server Technical Preview as Microsoft calls it. I blogged about this rather soon after the release of the Technical Preview First experiences with a rolling cluster upgrade of a lab Hyper-V Cluster (Technical Preview).
We’ve been able to do rolling updates of Windows NLB for a long time and we’ve been asking for that same capability in Windows Failover Clustering for many years and now, it’s finally coming! And yes, as you will notice we like that a lot!
You need to realize that making the transition form one version to another as smooth, easy and risk free as possible is of great value to the customer as it enables them to upgrade faster and get the benefits of their investment quicker. For Microsoft it means they can have more people move to more modern environments faster which helps with support and delivering value in a secure and modern environment.
At the end we also joke around a bit about DevOps and how this is just as set of training wheels on the road to true site resilience engineering. All fun and all good. Enjoy!
As you all probably know I’m also playing around with and testing Windows Server vNext Tech Preview and one of the nice new features in there I have my eye on is Soft Restart.
There is little information on this feature out there right now but from the description “Soft Restart” looks like a way to get faster Windows boot times by cutting down on device firmware initialization. When it’s not needed that would be a great thing to have as with > 10gbps live migration speeds the boot time of our hardware loaded (DRAC, NICs, HBA, BMC, …) servers is what makes it the longest single step per node during cluster aware updating. Interesting if this is indeed what it’s there for.
But let’s find out if this is indeed what we think it is 
. First of all the installation of this feature requires a restart. Keep this in mind.
There are 2 ways to kick it off that I know of but to me there must be more … it would be a shame not to have this integrated as an option into Cluster Aware Updating for example.
So let’s try shutdown /r /soft /t 000. No joy, doesn’t make one bit of difference and nothing logged or so to indicate an issue.
No joy here either …
So I figured I needed enterprise grade server hardware with some FC cards & lots of NIC and memory to notice the difference. On a VM it might do nothing, but I assure you I doesn’t do anything on the PC based home lab either. So I dragged a DELL PowerEdge R730 with exactly that into the game. But still no joy. Then I thought some more and decided it might integrate with the hardware capabilities to do so of I went to install the latest and greatest DELL Server Manager software to see if that make a difference. But again, no joy.
It’s probably not lit up yet in this release of the Technical Preview 9841. For now I’ll be content with the 28-30% improved reboot speeds the DELL R730 UEFI brought us. I’d love to speed things up a bit as time is money and valuable 
but we’ll have to wait for the next code drop to see if and how it works …