Continuous available general purpose file shares & ReFSv3 provide high available backup targets

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Introduction

In our previous two blog posts on Veeam and SMB 3 we’ve seen how and when Veeam Backup & Replication can leverage SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct. See Veeam Backup & Replication leverages SMB Multichannel and Veeam Backup & Replication Preferred Subnet & SMB Multichannel.The benefits of this are more bandwidth, high availability, better throughput and with RDMA low latency and CPU offload. What’s not to like, right? In a world where the compute and networks need keeps rising due to the storage capabilities (flash storage) pushing the limits this is all very welcome.

We have also seen earlier that Veeam B & R 9.5 leverages ReFSv3 in Windows Server 2016. This provides clear and present benefits in regards to space efficiencies and speed with many backup file related operations. Read Veeam Leads the way by leveraging ReFSv3 capabilities

When it comes to ReFSv3 in Windows Server 2016 most of the focus has gone to solutions based around Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). That’s a great solution and it is the poster child use case of these technologies.

But what other options do you have out there to build efficient and effective high available backup targets creatively except for S2D? What if you would like to repurpose existing hardware to build those? Let’s take a look together at how continuous available general purpose file shares & ReFSv3v3 provide high available backup targets

CSV, S2D, ReFSv3 & Archival Data

In Windows Server 2016, traditional shared storage (iSCSI, FC, Shared SAS, Shared RAID) with CSV are not recommend to be used with ReFSv3. Why isn’t exactly clear. The biggest impact you’ll see is the performance difference when not writing to the owner node of the CSV in this use case. Even with a well configured RDMA network that difference is significant. But that doesn’t mean that the performance is bad. It’s just that many of the super-fast meta data operations are relatively and significantly slower when compared each other, not that any of these two are slow.

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Microsoft does state that an S2D with ReFSv3 and SOFS shares can be used for archival data. Storage spaces and ReFSv3 also have the benefit of offering automatic repair of corrupt data from a redundant copy on the fly even when needed. So yes, the best know supported scenario is this one.

Continuous available general purpose file shares and ReFSv3 provide high available backup targets

But what if we need a high available backup target and would love to leverage ReFSv3 with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5? Well, you can have 95% of your cookie and eat it to. All this without ignoring the cautions offered.

We could set up SOFS shares on a Windows Server 2016 Cluster with ReFSv3 with traditional shared storage. Some storage vendors do state this is supported actually.

That only means you don’t have the auto repair functionality ReFSv3 combined with storage spaces offers. But perhaps you want to avoid the risk of using ReFSv3 with CSV in a non S2D scenario all together. What you could do is forgo ReFSv3 and use NTFS. How well this will work for archival data or backup is something you’ll need to test and find out how well this holds up. There is not much info is out there, only other cautions and warnings that might keep you up at night.

There is another scenario however and that is using Windows Server 2016 failover clustering to set up continuously available general purpose file shares that leverage SMB3 transparent failover.

The good news is that general purpose file shares (no CSV) do work consistently with ReFSv3 because such a share/LUN is only exposed on one cluster node at the time, the owner. By having multiple shares and setting preferred owners we can load balance the workload across all cluster nodes.

Thank to continuous availability for general file shares and SMB 3 transparent failover we can still get a high available backup target this way. The failover is fast enough to make this happen and all we see with Veeam Backup & Replication is a short pause in throughput before it resumes after failover. To put the icing on the cake, you can leverage SMB multichannel SMB Direct for both backup and restores.

I would take a sizeable whitepaper to walk through the setup so instead I’ll show you a a quick video of a POC we did in the lab here https://vimeo.com/212886392.

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If you want to learn more come to the community & other conferences I’m speaking at and will be around for Ask The Experts time opportunities. I’ll be at the German Hyper-V community meet up, The Cloud & Datacenter Conference in Germany 2017, Dell EMC World 2017 and last but not least VeeamON 2017 (see  May 2017 will be a travelling month). 

Conclusion

What do you lose?

Potentially there is one big loss in regards to the capabilities of ReFSv3 with this solution when you are not using storage spaces. This is that you lose the capability to automatic repair of corrupt data. The ability of ReFSv3 to do so is tied into the redundant copies of Storage Spaces (parity/mirror).

What do you get?

That’s fine, the strength of this design is that you get the speed and space efficiencies of ReFSv3and high available backup targets in way more scenarios than “just” S2D. After all, not everyone is in a position to choose their storage fabric for backup targets green field or at will. But they might be able to leverage existing storage and opt to use SMB 3 for their data transport.

So even if you can’t have it all, you can still build very good solutions. It offers ReFSv3 benefits and high availability for your backup target via transparent failover with SMB transparent failover on continuous available general purpose file shares. This also only requires Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition, which is a cost saving. You get to leverage SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct. All this while not ignoring the cautions of using ReFSv3 in certain scenarios.

On top of that, if you use NTFS with this approach it will also work for Windows Server 2012 (R2) as the OS for the backup target cluster hosts.

Disclaimer

I do not work for or at Microsoft, nor am I perfect or infallible just because I’m an MVP. You’ll have to do your own testing and validation. From our testing and without ReFSv3 bugs ruining the show, to me this is a very valid and cost effective approach.

Win a fully paid trip to VeeamOn 2017!

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Win a fully paid trip to VeeamOn 2017!

Are you located in the EMEA region? Do you live to protect & recover the IT systems businesses depend upon in a 24/7/365 economy? Are you convinced you should really attend VeeamON 2017 but you have not been able to secure a ticket or get the budget approved to do so?

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Convince me of your need to attend. Show me why you are the person that should really be at VeeamON 2017 but for some reason or mistake has been left behind. Why? Well, as a Veeam Vanguard who’s attending as well, I get to offer you to enter a raffle to be able to attend. The package includes a fully paid trip to VeeamOn 2017. That includes your flight, hotel and conference attendance!

Interested?

I need you to send me a short explanation via my contact page on my blog why you need to be at VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans. I will only filter for valid answers in order to sort out anyone not treating this seriously. Those valid replies will go into the Veaam Raffle where the lucky winner will be drawn. Don’t forget to include your full name so I can pass it along to Veeam with your e-mail address. The deadline is April 7th (CET). So don’t delay!

So, for those people serious about attending VeeamON 2017 but didn’t not get approval due to budget restrictions or management not will to let you go, this is your opportunity. With some effort and luck, you can step into an awesome world of techies that operate in an always on mindset. Those that live to protect IT systems so their businesses can thrive and if needed, survive when a calamity happens. You can come and learn with the best of the best.

Good luck to all!

May 2017 will be a travelling month

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Introduction

In ICT, you never stop learning. Changes come and go fast. Navigating through these turbulent times of rapid change, short value cycles in order to provide continuity in both services & value without falling behind or being held back is a challenge we all face every day. If you hire or employ technologists, please take a moment to consider what they pull off for you every day. It helps to be realistic on what to expect from and to achieve with them. For that a solid understanding of the technology ecosystem and good doctrine to achieve your goals are necessary. For that to really happen and for their efforts to pay off we need to make sure politics and bureaucracy are kept under control. Let your people shine and move ahead. Long term planning does not equate a strategy and you might find yourself out paced & maneuvered by the industry and your competitors. That’s a reason why you see technologist move up the ladder and take on the leadership role inside many companies. They tend to be better placed to see the opportunities and what these require. In that respect, it pays off to walk out of your office every now and then in order to prevent tunnel vision and echo chambers. That’s one of the reasons that for me May 2017 will be a travelling month.

May 2017 will be a travelling month

Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany

First, I’ll be in Munich, Germany, fort he Hyper-V community day and to both attend / speak at the Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany 2017. That’s a conference for and by the community and the speakers are all highly experienced people who talk the talk and walk the walk.

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I you can grab a ticket asap. From the very 1st edition the Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany has set the standard for what a conference should be like.  I’ll be talking about SMB Direct / RDMA on the Hyper-V community day and about Windows Server 2016 Failover Clustering & Hyper-V at the conference. Please feel free to come over an chat.

Dell EMC World 2017

After that I’m off to DELL EMC World 2017 where I’ll be diving into the offerings that exit today and in the near future. As you might have guessed I’m very interested in the DELL Storage Spaces solutions, there take on and use of ReFSv3 and Windows Server 2016. Next to that, I would not be nick named RoCE Balboa if I was not interested in networking. Hardware wise I have my eye on the S-Series S6100-ON as that is one versatile piece of equipment. Man, I imaging having a lab with a 6 of those to test and play around with. No to mention the S2D clusters & backup targets to hammer them with a nice workload. Throw in the Mellanox cards for good measure. I can dream right ? As I’m a realist I’m also very interested in their servers and still, the Compellent offerings, which as far as traditional SANs go is one easy to manage & leverage piece of gear. It goes without saying I’ll be taking a look at what the EMC addition to the portfolio can achieve for us as well as the DELL EMC 3rd party offerings

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VeeamOn 2017

After that I continue on to VeeamON 2017 which makes a great addition to the two above. The Windows Server 2016 core stack as the basis for Azure Stack, S2D running on that great DELLEMC hardware. Now have that protected and made continuous available by the Veeam Availability Suite 9.5. That’s how you get an amazing stack of technologies on which to build, support amazingly good services.

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At VeeamON 2017 I’ll be joining two big names in the industry Luca Dell’Oca and Carsten Rachfahl to talk about ReFSv3. We’ll be attending sessions and “hanging out” at the MSFT boot as well.

So, no rest for a Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Extended Experts team member, Azure Advisor, a DELL Community Rockstar and a Veeam Vanguard. We’re always reading up, learning, investigating, sharing experiences & insights with our peers and learning from them. Conferences done right are very valuable and a great networking / leaning opportunity. Make the most of them when you can.

My value is your value

These conferences together with our focus on some very innovative and promising public and hybrid cloud technologies in Azure will keep me busy contemplating designs, testing the concepts of solution I have in my mind and delivering very efficient and effective solutions both in functionality as well as in TCO and ROI. That (and caffeine) combined with working with great and smart people is what makes me run. So for that reason alone I do not mind that May 2017 will be a travelling month.

Veeam Backup & Replication Preferred Subnet & SMB Multichannel

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Introduction

In a previous blog post Veeam Backup & Replication leverages SMB Multichannel post we showed that Veeam backup & Replication leverages SMB multichannel when possible.

But what about Veeam Backup & Replication Preferred Subnet & SMB Multichannel, does that work? We mentioned that we wanted to answer the question what happens if we configure a preferred back-up network in Veeam Backup & Replication. Would this affect the operation of SMB multichannel at all? By that I means, would enabling a preferred network in Veeam prevent multichannel from using more than one NIC?

In this blog post we dive in to that question and some scenarios. We actually need to be able to deal with multiple scenarios. When you have equally capable NICs that are on different subnets you might want to make sure it uses only one. Likewise, you want both to be used whether they are or are not on the same subnet even if you set a preferred subnet in Veeam. The good news is that the nature of SMB Multichannel and how Veaam preferred networks work do allow for flexibility to achieve this. But it might not work like you would expect, unless you understand SMB Multichannel.

Veeam Backup & Replication Preferred Subnet & SMB Multichannel

For this blog post we adapt our lab networking a bit so that our non-management 10Gbps rNICs are on different subnets. We have subnet 10.10.110.0/24 for one set of NICs and 10.10.120.0/24 for the second set of NICs. This is shown in the figure below.

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These networks can live in a separate VLAN or not, that doesn’t really matter. It does matter if to have a tagged VLAN or VLANS if you want to use RDMA because you need it to have the priority set.

We now need to configure our preferred network in Veeam Backup & Replication. We go to the main menu and select Network Traffic Rules

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In the Global Network Traffic Rules window, click Networks.

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In the Preferred Networks window, select the Prefer the following networks for backup and replication traffic check box.

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Click Add. We use the CIDR notation to fill out our preferred network or you can use the network mask and click OK.

To prove a point in regards to how Multichannel works isn’t affected by what you fill out here we add only one of our two subnets here. SMB will see where it can leverage SMB multichannel and it will kick in. Veeam isn’t blocking any of its logic.

So now we kick of a backup of our Hyper-V host to our SMB hare target backup repository. We can see multichannel work just fine.

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Below is a screenshot on the backup target of the backup running over SMB multichannel, leveraging 2 subnets, while having set only one of those as the preferred network in Veeam Backup & Replication

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Look at my backup fly … and this is only one host that’s being backup (4 VMs actually). Have I told you how much I love flash storage? And why I’m so interested in getting ReFS hybrid volumes with SSD/SATA disks to work as backup target? I bet you do!

Looking good and it’s easy, right? Well not so fast!

Veeam does not control SMB Multichannel

Before you think you’re golden here and in control via Veeam lets do another demo. In the preferred network, we enter a subnet available to both the source and the target server but that is an LBFO (teamed) NIC with to 1Gbps members (RSS is enabled).

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No let’s see what happens when we kick of a backup.

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Well SMB multichannel just goes through its rules and decided to take the two best, equally capable NICs. These are still our two 10Gbps rNICs. Whatever you put in the preferred network is ignored.

This is neither good or bad but you need to be aware of this in order to arrange for backups to leverage the network path(s) you had in mind. This is to avoid surprises. The way to do that the same as you plan and design for all SMB multichannel traffic.

As stated in the previous blog post you can control what NICs SMB multichannel will use by designing around the NIC capabilities or if needed disabling or enabling some of these or by disabling SMB multichannel on a NIC. This isn’t always possible or can lead to issues for other workloads so the easiest way to go is using SMB Multichannel Constraints. Do note however that you need to take into consideration what other workloads on your server leverage SMB Multichannel when you go that route to avoid possible issues.

As an example, I disabled multichannel on my hosts. Awful idea but it’s to prove point. And still with our 10.10.0.0/16 subnet set as preferred subnet I ran a backup again.

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As you can see the 2*1Gbps LBFO NIC is doing all the lifting on both hosts as it’s switch independent and not LACP load balancing mode we’re limited to 1Gbps.

So how do we control the NICs used with SMB multichannel?

Well SMB Multichannel rules apply. You use your physical design, the capabilities of the NICs and SMB constraints. In reality you’re better off using your design and if needed SMB multichannel constraints to limit SMB to the NICs you want it to use. Do not that disabling SMB Multichannel (client and or server) is a global for the host. Consider this as it affects all NICs on the host, not just the ones you have in mind for your backups. In most cases these NICs will be the same. Messing around with disabling multichannel or NIC capabilities (RSS, RDMA) isn’t a great solution. But it’s good to know the options and behavior.

Some things to note

Realize you don’t even have to set both subnets in the preferred subnets if they are different. SMB kicks of over one, sees it can leverage both and just does so. The only thing you manipulated here SMB multichannel wise is which subnet is used first.

If both of our rNICs would have been on the same subnet you would not even have manipulated this.

Another thing that’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t require your Veeam Backup & Replication VM to have an IP address in any of the SMB multichannel subnets. So as long as the source Hyper-V hosts and the backup target are connected you’re good to go.

Last but not least, and already mentioned in the previous blog post, this also leverages RDMA capabilities when available to help you get the best throughput, lowest latency and leave those CPU cycles for other needs. Scalability baby! No I realize that you might think that the CPU offload benefit is not a huge deal on your Hyper-V host but consider the backup target being hammered by several simultaneous backups. And also consider that some people their virtual machines look like below in regards to CPU usage, in ever more need of more vCPU and CPU time slices.

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And that’s what the Hyper-V host looks like during a backup without SMB Direct (with idle VMs mind you).

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All I’m saying here is don’t dismiss RDMA too fast, everything you can leverage to help out and that is available for free in the box is worth considering.

Note: I have gotten the feedback that Veeam doesn’t support SMB Direct and that this was confirmed by Veeam Support. Well, Veeam Backup & Replication leverages SMB 3 but that’s an OS feature. Veeam Backup & Replication will work with SMB Multichannel, Direct, Signing, Transparent Failover … It’s out of the Veeam Backup & Replication scope of responsibilities as we have seen here. You feel free to leverage SMB Direct whether that is using iWarp/Roce or Infiniband. This information was confirmed by Veeam and bears the “Anton Gostev seal of approval”. So if SMB Direct cause issues you have a configuration problem with that feature, it’s not Veeam not being able to support it, it doesn’t know or care actually.

Conclusion

The elegance and simplicity of the Veeam Backup & Replication GUI are deceiving. Veeam is extremely powerful and is surprisingly flexible in how you can leverage and configure it. I hope both my previous blog post and this one have given you some food for thought and ideas. There’s more Veeam goodness to come in the coming months when times allows. Many years ago, when SMB 3 was introduced I demonstrated the high availability capabilities this offered for Veeam backups. I’ll be writing about that in another blog post.