Microsoft has released Windows Server 2019 with a new resiliency mode called nested resiliency. This mode enables to handle two failures in a two-node S2D cluster. Nested Resiliency comes in two flavors: nested two-way mirroring and nested mirror-accelerated parity. I’m certain that two-way mirroring is faster than nested mirror-accelerated parity but the first one provides only 25% of usable capacity ...

Microsoft just released Windows Server 2019 with a lot of improvement for Storage Spaces Direct. One of these improvements is the nested resiliency that is specific for 2-node S2D cluster. Thanks to this feature, a 2-node S2D cluster can now support two failures, at the cost of storage dedicated for resiliency. Nested Resiliency comes in two flavors: Nested two-Way mirroring: ...

Most of my customers try to backup their infrastructure at night to avoid impacting the user workloads. Sometimes there are so much data that the night is not enough to backup the whole infrastructure. Usually customers have a decent production infrastructure in term of speed and the bottleneck is the storage repository. For this kind of storage, we prefer to ...

These days I’m trying in depth Windows Server 2019. Today I chose to pay attention to Remote Desktop Services. The goal of my lab is to deploy a RDS Farm with all components and with the new HTML5 Remote Desktop Client. Even though I’m running my lab on Windows Server 2019, you can also deploy the HTML5 client on Windows ...

It’s been a while that Microsoft releases new Windows Server 2019 builds regularly. The latest public build holds a new feature called System Insights. It enables the analysis for the usage of some system resources such as CPU, storage and network and build forecasting. Moreover, in specific situations, a script can be run to resolve the incident. System Insights is ...

Dell provides a smart utility to update firmware and drivers in their servers. This utility is called Server Update Utility or shortly: SUU. SUU is an ISO that holds all drivers and firmware for all supported hardware. When you use SUU in a Windows Server, it detects hardware, firmware’s versions and driver’s versions. Then SUU asks you if you wish ...

Parallel rebuild is a Storage Spaces features that enables to repair a storage pool even if the failed disk is not replaced. This feature is not new to Storage Spaces Direct because it exists also since Windows Server 2012 with Storage Spaces. This is an automatic process which occurs if you have enough free space in the storage pool. This ...

StarWind V2V converter is a free tool provided by StarWind to convert virtual hard drive. You can convert Hyper-V virtual hard drive (VHDX) to VMware ESXi virtual hard drive (VMDK) and vice versa. Other virtual hard drive formats are supported such as qcow2. Because StarWind V2V convert only the virtual hard drive, you can’t automate the migration between hypervisor. So, ...

When Windows Server 2016 has been released, the data deduplication was not available for ReFS file system. With Storage Spaces Direct, the volume should be formatted in ReFS to get latest features (Accelerated VHDX operations) and to get the best performance. So, for Storage Spaces Direct data deduplication was not available. Data Deduplication can reduce the storage usage by removing ...

Nutanix AHV is a custom KVM hypervisor integrated to Nutanix ecosystem such as Prism. This is an enterprise-class hypervisor and an alternative solution to VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V when deploying Nutanix. Nutanix AHV is fully integrated to Nutanix Prism and there is no other GUI to manage this hypervisor. To eases the migration to the Nutanix hypervisor from VMware, ...