Storage

Last week I worked for a customer who went through a performance issue on a S2D cluster. The customer’s infrastructure is composed of one compute cluster (Hyper-V) and one 4-node S2D cluster. First, I checked if it was related to the network and then if it’s a hardware failure that produces this performance drop. Then I ran the script watch-cluster.ps1 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This week, in part of my job I deployed a Storage Replica between two S2D Clusters. I’d like to share with you the steps I followed to implement the storage replication between two S2D hyperconverged cluster. Storage Replica enables to replicate volumes at the block-level. For my customer, Storage Replica is part of a Disaster Recovery Plan in case of ...

StarWind Virtual SAN is a Software-Defined Storage solution which enables to replicate data across several nodes to ensure availability. The data are mirrored between two or more nodes. Hypervisor can be installed in the StarWind Virtual SAN nodes (hyperconverged) or separated from hypervisor (converged). StarWind Virtual SAN is easy to use and provide high performance. Moreover, StarWind provides pro active ...

Usually, I’m not speaking about news but only about technical details. But with the release of Windows Server 2016 1709, lot of misinformation have been written and I’d like to show another way to look at this. First of all, it is important to understand what happened to Windows Server 2016. Microsoft has modified how Windows Server is distributed to ...

Earlier in the week, I published a blog post about Honolulu project and how in the future, this tool can ease Windows Server management. Today I introduce another management tool for Storage Spaces Direct (hyperconverged or disaggregated). This tool is called StarWind Manager and it is developed by … StarWind. StarWind Manager is currently in preview version and for the ...

StarWind VSAN free provides a free Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solution for two nodes. With this solution, you are able to deliver a highly available storage based on Direct-Attached Storage devices. On top of StarWind VSAN free, you can deploy a Microsoft Failover Clustering with Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). So you can deploy a converged SDS solution with Windows Server 2016 ...

A Storage Spaces Direct cluster is based on a Windows Server 2016. Even if you use Windows Server with user Experience, Windows Server Core or Nano Server, you have to patch your operating system. The patching is important for security, stability and to improve features. Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) is a new feature and it is really important to patch ...

This week I was in Stockholm to build a Storage Spaces Direct cluster (hyperconverged model). When implementing the cluster, I have seen that a physical disk was failing. I’ve written this topic to show you how I have replaced this disk. Identify the failed physical disk I was deploying VMFleet when I saw the both virtual disks in a degraded ...