Category Archives: Windows Server

Microsoft Keeps Investing In Storage Big Time

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Disclaimer: These are my musing on the limited info available about Windows Server vNext and based on the Technical Preview bits at the time of writing. So it’s not set in stone & has a time limited value.

Reading the documentation that’s already available on vNext of Windows it’s clear that Microsoft is continuing it’s push towards the software defined data center. They are also pushing high to continuous availability ever more towards the  “continuous” side of things.

It’s early days yet and we just only downloaded the Technical Preview but what do we read in What’s New in Storage Services in Windows Server Technical Preview

Storage Quality of Service

  • They are giving us more Storage Quality of Service tied into the use of SOFS as storage over SMB3. As way to many NAS solutions don’t support SMB3 or only partially (in a restricted way) it’s clear too me that self build SOFS solution on a couple of servers is and remains the best SMB3 implementation on the market and has just gotten storage QoS.

Little Rant here: To the people that claim that this is not capable of high performance, I usually laugh. Have you actually build a SOFS or TFFS with 10Gbps networking on modern enterprise grade servers line the DELL R720 or 730? Did you look at the results form that relative low cost investment? I think not, really. And if you did and found it lacking, I’ll be very impressed of the workload you’re running.  You’ll force your storage to the knees earlier than your Windows file server nowadays.

  • It’s in the SOFS layer, so this does not tie you into to Storage Space if you’re not ready for that yet but would like the benefits of SOFS. As long as you have shared storage behind the SOFS you’re good.
  • It’s policy based and can apply to virtual machines, groups of virtual machines a service or a tenant
  • The virtual disk is the level where the policy is set & enforced.
  • Storage performance will dynamically adjust to meet the policies & when tied the performance will be fairly distributed.
  • You can monitor all this.

It’s right there in the OS.

Storage Replica

This gives us “storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability. Synchronous replication enables mirroring of data in physical sites with crash-consistent volumes ensuring zero data loss at the file system level. Asynchronous replication allows site extension beyond metropolitan ranges with the possibility of data loss.”

Look for Hyper-V we already had Hyper-V replica (which is also being improved), but for other workloads we still rely on the storage vendors or 3rd party solutions. But now I can have my storage replicas for service protection and continuity out of the box with Windows.  WOW!

and as we read on ..

  • Provide an all-Microsoft disaster recovery solution for planned and unplanned outages of mission-critical workloads.
  • Use SMB3 transport with proven reliability, scalability, and performance.
  • Stretch clusters to metropolitan distances.
    Use Microsoft software end to end for storage and clustering, such as Hyper-V, Storage Replica, Storage Spaces, Cluster, Scale-Out File Server, SMB3, Deduplication, and ReFS/NTFS.
  • Help reduce cost and complexity as follows:

Hardware agnostic, with no requirement to immediately abandon legacy storage such as SANs.

Allows commodity storage and networking technologies.
Features ease of graphical management for individual nodes and clusters through Failover Cluster Manager and Microsoft Azure Site Recovery.

Includes comprehensive, large-scale scripting options through Windows PowerShell.

  • Helps reduce downtime, and increase reliability and productivity intrinsic to Windows.
  • Provide supportability, performance metrics, and diagnostic capabilities.

I have gotten this to work in the lab with some trial and error but this is the Technical Preview, not a finish product. If they continue along this path I’m pretty confident we’ll have functional & operational viable solution by RTM. Just think about the possibilities this brings!

Storage Spaces

Now I have not read much on Storage Space in vNext yet but I think its safe to assume we’ll see major improvements there as well. Which leads me to reaffirm my blog posy here: TechEd 2013 Revelations for Storage Vendors as the Future of Storage lies With Windows 2012 R2

Microsoft is delivering more & great software defined storage inbox. This means cost effective yet very functional storage solutions. On top of that they put pressure on the market to deliver more value if they want to stay competitive. As a customer, whatever solution fits my needs the best, I welcome that. And as a consumer of large amounts of storage in a world where we need to spend the money where it matters most I like what I’m seeing.

Tip for Microsoft: configurability, reliability and EASY diagnostics and remediation are paramount to success. Sure some storage vendor solution aren’t to great on that front either but some are awesome. Make sure your in the awesome category. Make it a great user experience from start to finish in both deployment and operations.

Tip for you: If you’re not ready for prime time with Storage Spaces , SMB Direct etc … do what I’ve done. Use it where it doesn’t kill you if you hit some learning curves. What about storage spaces as a backup target where you can now replicate the backups of to your disaster recovery site?

Hot Add & Remove Static Memory in a Hyper-V vNext Virtual Machine

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One of the very nice and handy new capabilities in Windows Server vNext Hyper-V (Windows Server 2015 or Windows Server 10?) is the fact that you can now hot add or remove memory from a virtual machine with a fixed amount of memory. Another step towards continuous availability.

Here’s a test virtual machine RAGNAR running the Technology Preview bits on my test cluster. As you can see it has 1024MB of fixed memory. And Dynamic memory is not enabled.

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I can simply adjust this upward by typing in the value and clicking “Apply”

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and downwards in the same way

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Cool huh!

On top of this to make sure you’re not adding memory needlessly when someone says they need more memory for their VM you can see the memory demand now in the GUI. Both in Hyper-V Manager and in the Failover Clustering GUI.

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The technical preview of Windows vNext is looking good even in this early stage and I have no doubt it’s only going to get better Open-mouthed smile.

Some things to note

  • It’s configurable via PowerShell so you can start dreaming of script to query memory assignment & demand and use that output to redistribute memory available on the host amongst the VMs …

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  • Both Hyper-V host and guest have to run vNext (Technical Preview)
  • The guest has to be a generation 2 VM
  • It’s still virtualization technology and not magic, so if you try to assign more memory than available you’ll get a warning Winking smile

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First experiences with a rolling cluster upgrade of a lab Hyper-V Cluster (Technical Preview)

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Introduction

In vNext we have gotten a long awaited  & very welcome new capability: rolling cluster upgrades. Which for the Hyper-V roles is a 100% zero down time experience. The only step that will require some down time is the upgrade of the virtual machine configuration files to vNext (version 5 to 6) as the VM has to be shut down for this.

How to

The process for a rolling upgrade is so straight forward I’ll just give you a quick bullet list of the first part of the process:

  • Evacuate the workload from the cluster node you’re going to upgrade
  • Evict the node to upgrade to vNext from the cluster
  • Upgrade (no in place upgrade supported but in your lab you can get away with it)
  • Add the upgraded node to the cluster
  • Rinse & repeat until all nodes have been upgraded (that can take a while with larger clusters)

Please note that all actions you administration you do on a cluster in mixed mode should be done from a node running vNext or a system running Windows 10 with the vNext RSAT installed.

Once you’ve upgraded all nodes in the cluster, the situation you’re in now is basically that you’re running a Windows Server vNext Hyper-V cluster in cluster functional level 8 (W2K12R2) and the next step is to upgrade to 9, which is vNext, no there no 10 yet in server Winking smile

You do this by executing the Update-ClusterFunctionalLevel cmdlet. This is an online process.  Again, do this from a node running vNext or a system running Windows 10 with the vNext RSAT installed. Note that this is where you’re willing to commit to the vNext level for the cluster. That’s where you want to go but you get to decide when. When you’ve do this you can’t go back to W2K12R2. It’s a matter of fact that as long as you’re running cluster functional level 8, you can reverse the entire process. Talk about having options! I like having options, just ask Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver), he’ll tell you it’s one of my mantras.

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When this goes well you can just easily check the cluster functional level as follows:

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When this is done you can do the upgrade of the VM configuration by running the Update-VMConfigurationVersion cmdlet. This is an off line process where the VMs you’re updating have to be shut down. You can do this for just one VM, all or anything in between. This is when you decided you’re committing to all the goodness vNext brings you.  But the fact that you have some time before you need to do it means you can  easily get those machine to run smoothly on a W2K12R2 cluster in case you need to roll back. Remember, options are good!

Doing so updates VM version from 5 to 6 and enables new Hyper-V features (hit F5 a lot or reopen Hyper-V Manager to see the value change.

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Note: If in the lab you’re running some VMs on a cluster node are not highly available (i.e. they’re not clustered) they cannot be updated until the cluster functional level has been upgraded to version 9.

Win a free ticket to Experts Live 2014

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As you might already know I’m speaking at the Dutch IT community event Experts Live 2014 in the Netherlands. The talk is about “The Capable & Scalable Cloud OS “ where we’ll highlight and show some of the scalable capabilities in Windows Server 2012 R2 when combined with great hardware.

You can find the program at Experts Live 2014 which is very rich in content. There are 7 tracks and over 40 sessions! Chose a track or mix and match to your hearts content between  Microsoft Azure, System Center, Hyper-V, SQL, Windows, PowerShell and Office365. It’s all good.

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To celebrate the success of the event the organizers have allowed us to give away some free entrance tickets. This is a very nice gift that will allow you to enjoy a full day of learning for free.

So convince me you’re willing to put in the time and effort to learn and we’ll help you do exactly that by making sure you get a free ticket!  Leave a reply to this blog post from Thursday October 9th till Thursday October 16th in which you tell me what blog or blogs of mine you’ve enjoyed most. Leave your name, e-mail, your company and function title so we can arrange things for you. Don’t worry we will not publish these.

There is only one request/condition … if you win a ticket come to the event as a no show means some one else can’t come.