Dienstag, 9. Dezember 2014

Donnerstag, 4. Dezember 2014

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

Sonntag, 5. Oktober 2014

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

Freitag, 16. Mai 2014

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!