Azure Stack Install Requirements

This was installed on a DELL R730 with 2 SSDs and 4 HDDs
pre) RAID 1 for OS / 4 x RAID 0  HDD / disable SD-CARD in BIOS  / Set BIOS to max Performance

1) Install 2016 TP4, just change Keyboard Layout, no other Roles,change Name of the Server
2) Just connect one NIC to your LAN, disable all other network devices
3) Disable Firewall / Defender
4) install all Patches from the Updatemanager
5) Run Powershell "DeployAzureStack.ps1" as administrator

FileSystem NTFS Block Size

Artikel to MS for default Block Size here

CPS 1.0 Update 2 Released

There were a lot of changes in CPS for System Center, Windows Server 2012 R2 and DELL Hardware (FW, Drivers)

For all details: link

Windows Server 2016 TP3 and System Center 2016 TP3 released

Windows Server 2016 TP 3 download link
System Center 2016 TP3 download link

And a perfect Customer Experience Guides for Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 can be found here

NEXT: iWarp vs. RoCE Chelsio vs. Mellanox 10 GB/s

WSUS Download Speed to slow since 2012 R2 up to 10 times faster

During my POC I need to bring a up to date WSUS to my customer dedicated environments with no WAN connectivity.
Every time I set up a fresh WSUS I had to wait 3 days after 20 GByte were downloaded with 2 MBit/s  with a 100Mbit/s internet connection . That was and is to slow.

The reason is that the BITS configuration was changed from Microsoft. To speed up your WSUS Server you have to:

Install on your WSUS Server:

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Native Client
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Command Line Utilities

You can download them from here:
link

Then navigate to the new folder:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn

Run administrative CMD:
SQLCMD.exe -S \\.\pipe\Microsoft##WID\tsql\query -d "SUSDB" -Q "update tbConfigurationC set BitsDownloadPriorityForeground=1"

or

.\SQLCMD.exe -S \\.\pipe\Microsoft##WID\tsql\query -d "SUSDB" -Q "update tbConfigurationC set BitsDownloadPriorityForeground=1"


Revert:
SQLCMD.exe -S \\.\pipe\Microsoft##WID\tsql\query -d "SUSDB" -Q "update tbConfigurationC set BitsDownloadPriorityForeground=0"

Storage Spaces Direct - Processor Compatibility settings

Found this comment in a MS BLOG for Storage Spaces Direct SSDi in Windows Server 2016 as VM

"Note: Do not enable the virtual machine’s Processor Compatibility setting.  This setting disables certain processor capabilities that S2D requires inside the VM. This option is unchecked by default, and needs to stay that way.  You can see this setting here:"

Take this tutorial for further information: link

Storage Spaces Direct - Microsoft Windows Server 2016

A new great storage Feature in Windows Server 2016 is Storage Spaces Direct. Also known as Shared Nothing Scale out File Server.

The video from Ignite 2015 is here

Here are the features and requirements:

It can be deployed on Hyper-V  Server as "Private Cloud Hyper-Converged" installations
for small to medium size environment

Technical Preview 2 not yet  7:50 in video
update: Storage Spaces Direct works great in TP2
update 2: Storage Spaces Direct is much faster in TP3


It can be deployed in traditional way " Privat Cloud Storage"
Typically larger scale out deployments

• File System will be ReFS as primary file system
• Up to 240 Disks per Pool
• RDMA interconnect for low latency and low CPU usage
• Rebalancing for capacity (add node or remove node)
• Technical Preview 2 -- min. 4 Server - max 12 server - max of 240 disk in a pool

Required Hardware from DELL : R730xd (4 of them / LSI 9207-8i (Perc is not running at the moment)

Storage Spaces Data Placement:

Virtual disk consists of Extents (1GB)

Hyper-V Windows Server 2016 technical preview 2 from IGNITE 2015

New features in Hyper-V Windows Server 2016, not all Features are communicated until final release.

• Hyper-V is available on Nano Server 
• virtual TPM Security 
• Secure Boot for Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 / SUSE LES 12)
• Shielded VMs (encrypted by Bitlocker,etc) 
• SoFS can now QoS IO by owner of the VMs - Important for Tenants
•  Storage Resiliency with Resilience File Handle from SoFS. After 60 sec the VM is paused not crashed. After the network connectivity is restored the VM will restart running.
• Cluster Resiliency Feature: After a clusternode was removed from the cluster majority all VMs were turned off on this node. This was fixed by Isolation Mode for the VMs and clusternode, after the network came back the isolation mode exits and all VMs stay online.
• hotadd/ remove Memory static or dynamic configuration
• hotadd/ remove network adapter
• Upgrade from Windows Server 2012 R2 Cluster to Windows Server 2016 without downtime, with rollback function
•  support for production checkpoints, VSS Snapshot for SQL,Exchange during taking checkpoint. After restore of checkpoint the VM , the VM starts with a clean boot. The application and OS interpret this as a normal restore.
• PowerShell from host OS to guest OS
• ReFS for VHDX Operations 
• ReFS instance disk merge for checkpoints with zero data copy- this is really great
• ReFS instance fix disk creation

 -

Books and Whitepapers

Two great new free e-books about Azure Automation and VMM Hyper-V can be found here

Azure Automation

Deploy Hyper-V with SDS & SDN

a great whitepaper from Kristian Nese about

Hybrid Cloud with NVGRE (Cloud OS)


an overview to all free e-books:
here

System Center 2012 R2 Update Rollup 4

All instructions about the Rollup and download links can be found here

Desired State Configuration Wave 8

Wave 8 includes new xDSC resources: link for Download
but first you have to install the Microsoft Management Framework 5.0 : link for Download

KB300850 - Storage Spaces Update for Windows Server 2012 R2

New November update. please follow the following instruction if you have Spaces and SoFs in place

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn858079.aspx

The installation takes very long. About 12-15 min. On VMs deployed fresh with SP1 there could be an error when you deploy all updates once. Tip: Deploy all updates except the KB 3000850. Reboot deploy KB 3000850.
 

If you receive any errors during installation, or the installation failes, please install this patch
Hyper-V: Update List for Windows Server 2012 R2
Recommended hotfixes and updates for Windows Server 2012 R2-based failover clusters
List of currently available hotfixes for the File Services technologies in Windows Server 2012 R2

Download the TechED Channel 9 Content PowerShell Script

Here you can find a powerfull TechED 2014 Europe Content Downloader. Executed via PowerShell
link to TechNet Gallery

Storage Space - Tiering at Technet

A very good article about Storage Spaces and tiering can be found here

Windows Server Volume Replication - Storage Replica

For a Server to Server scenario

1.) Install Windows Feature: Windows Volume Replication and File Server
2.) Create two exact looking Hard Drives LUNs (Data up to 10TB,Log up to 10% of DATA should be SSD) per Server and format with GPT
3.) open PowerShell with Administrator Rights
4.) run 

New-SRPartnership -SourceComputerName w10-01 -SourceRGName RG01 -ReplicationMode Synchronous -SourceVolumeName e: -SourceLogVolumeName f: -DestinationComputerName w10-02.de1.loc -DestinationRGName rg02 -DestinationVolumeName e: -DestinationLogVolumeName f: -LogSizeInBytes 8gb

5.) The destination LUN will be marked as RAW, at the moment you cannot access this without deleting the SR Group and delete the SR Partnership
6.) Delete SR Partnership and Group
7) run on Source Server (PowerShell)

Get-SRPartnership | Remove-SRPartnership
Get-SRGroup | % { Remove-SRGroup -Name $_.name }

8) run on Destination Server (PowerShell)

Get-SRGroup | % { Remove-SRGroup -Name $_.name }

9) Access the files on Destionation Server mirror

10) during working with WVR check:
On the source server for events 5002, 2200, and 5015.
On the destination server for events 5015, 5001, and 5009

Update 8.10.2014 New Whitepaper from Microsoft : here

Two good links:

Link1

Link2

Microsoft Scale out File Server (SMB) vs. direct attached Storage (iSCSI)

What will be the performance impact if you follow the Microsoft SMB3.0 strategy. So all of you know the new storage concept with SMB 3.02 and all of its components like Scale out File Server (SoFS)0 Cluster new SMB 3.02 Features like "resume keys" and multipath. If not start reading  here

So the point is: How much performance will be lost if you place the cool new SoFS between your Storage System and your Hyper-V or SQL Server (The only two Roles that support SoFS and SMB3.02). You understand. It is an additional component with delays in the storage path, an active system that generates physical delays. But how lage is the impact ?

For this we created a 3 server and 1 storage system test scenario (see picture below).
2 Hyper-V Nodes. One connected direct via 2 x 1 GBit/s to and DELL EQL System, the other Hyper-V was connected via 1 x 10 GB RDMA to the SoFS.This SoFS was even connected with 2 x 1GBit/s to the EQL System.

After this we created one VM on each Hyper-V Host. One was on the iSCSI Target and the other was on the SMB share created on the SoFS.

To have just the delay in the system we did not enable the CSV Cache on the SoFS. But what is absolute recommended was the Mellanox RDMA 10 GBit/s Network connection to the SoFS.



We started the test with IOMeter. A couple of test created these average times:

Transfer iSCSI via 2x1GB (10min)
(3 Worker 8 KB 60% random /65 % read)
Total I/O per Second: 4515
Total MB per Second : 35,30
Avg Response Time 9,65 ms

Transfer SMB 3 via 10GB RDMA (10min)
(3 Worker 8 KB 60% random /65 % read)
Total I/O per Second: 4425
Total MB per Second : 34,56
Avg Response Time 9,79 ms

Summary:
A SoFS creates an additional 0,1 ms delay to the response time of the whole system. Focus on the I/O = this will result in a very small I/O reduction (~90 I/O less than direct iSCSI).
This is a great result for the Microsoft SoFS Solution ! So if you need the SMB3.02 Features go and test the SoFS in your hopefully existing test environment!