Networking

In a Storage Spaces Direct cluster, the network is the most important part. If the network is not well designed or implemented, you can expect poor performance and high latency. All Software-Defined are based on a healthy network whether it is Nutanix, VMware vSAN or Microsoft S2D. When I audit S2D configuration, most of the time the issue comes from ...

When we deploy Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), either hyperconverged or disaggregated, we have to configure the networking part. Usually we work with Dell hardware to deploy Storage Spaces Direct and the one of the switches supported by the Dell reference architectures is the Dell S4048 (Force 10). In this topic, we will see how to configure this switch from scratch. ...

Like the others, Mellanox network adapters should be updated to the latest firmware to solve issues. When you download the Mellanox firmware release note, you can see how much reported issues have been solved (usually, a lot :)). Mellanox provides tools to update and manage the firmware from Linux, Freebsd, VMware ESXi, Windows and Windows PE. Thanks to this set ...

Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) is a new feature in the Software-Defined Networking stack that will be included in Windows Server 2016. It enables to group several physical network adapters (from one to eight) into a single virtual network adapters in a Hyper-V environment. In fact, it is SET is an alternative to standard NIC teaming. The main advantage of SET ...

Network Controller is a new feature which will be available with Windows Server 2016. This feature enables to manage centrally the virtual and the physical network infrastructure to automate the management, configuration monitoring and troubleshooting. After a quick overview about network controller, I’ll explain how to deploy network controller and how to connect it to Virtual Machine Manager. Network Controller ...

Since Windows Server 2012, the converged networking is supported by Microsoft. This concept enables to share an Ethernet adapter for several network traffics. Before that, it was recommended to dedicate a network adapter per network traffic (backup, cluster and so on). So thanks to the converged networking, we can use a single Ethernet adapter (or teaming) to carry several network ...