Lately I worked for a customer to add two nodes in an existing 2-nodes Storage Spaces Direct cluster. The existing nodes are running on Windows Server 2016 while the new ones are running on Windows Server 2019. So, when I integrated the new nodes to the cluster, it was in mixed operating system mode because two different versions of Windows ...
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The firmware and driver’s management can be a pain during the lifecycle of an Azure Stack HCI. Some firmware are not supported, others must be installed to solve an issue. In the case of Dell hardware, a support matrix is available here. If you look at that matrix, you’ll see firmware and drivers for storage devices, Host Bus Adapter, switches, ...
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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 ...
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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: ...
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When you deploy VMware vSAN in the vSphere environment, the solution comes from several tools to monitor, find performance bottleneck and to troubleshoot VMware vSAN issue. All the information that I’ll introduce you in this topic are built-in to vCenter. Unfortunately, all vSAN configuration, metrics and alerts are not available yet from HTML5 board. So the screenshots were taken from ...
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Few months ago, I have written a topic about the next gen Microsoft management tool called Honolulu project. Honolulu provides management for standalone Windows Server, failover clustering and hyperconverged. Currently hyperconverged management works only on Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) versions (I cross finger for Honolulu support on Windows Server LTSC). I have upgraded my lab to latest technical preview ...
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Today I release a special Christmas gift for you. For some time, I’m writing a PowerShell script to generate a Storage Spaces Direct dashboard. This dashboard enables you to validate each important setting for a S2D cluster. I decided to write this PowerShell script to avoid to run hundred of PowerShell cmdlet and check manually returned value. With this dashboard, ...
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This week I worked for a customer which had issue with his Storage Spaces Direct cluster (S2D). When he restarted a node, Windows Server didn’t start and a bluescreen appeared. It is because the operating system disks were plugged on S130 while Storage Spaces Direct devices were connected to HBA330mini. It is an unsupported configuration especially with Dell R730XD. In ...
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When a customer calls me to design or validate the hardware configuration for hyperconverged infrastructure with Storage Spaces Direct, there is often a misunderstanding about the remaining useable capacity, the required cache capacity and ratio, and the different mode of resilience. With this topic, I’ll try to help you to plan the storage for hyperconverged and to clarify some points. ...
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Yesterday VMware released vSAN 6.6. vSAN 6.6 brings a lot of new features and improvements such as encryption, increase of performance and simplified management. You can get the release notes here. Currently my lab is running on vSAN 6.5 and I have decided to upgrade to vSAN 6.6. In this topic I’ll show you how to upgrade VMware vSAN from 6.5 ...
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