Comments on: Implement Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server Technical Preview 2

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 17:21:34 +0000

Thank you. That was exactly what I was looking for. I am stuck with non-RDMA NICs so have to manually prioritize my networks.

By: Romain Serre

Romain Serre — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 14:56:11 +0000

Hi,

Yes you can do this: //www.tech-coffee.net/2-node-hyperconverged-cluster-with-windows-server-2016/. Just set a low cluster network metrics on storage and live-migration network and the storage traffic will pass through these cluster networks.

Regards,

Romain

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 13:44:58 +0000

Hi Romain,

Thanks for the explanation. So S2D works a bit different than a regular cluster.

If I would have nodes with 3 NICs: 2x 10G and 1x 1G for example. Can I create a hyperv virtualswitch on the 1G card, share the card with the host for management and use the other 2 10G NICs for S2D and Migration? Would that work? I really want to prevent storage traffic from flowing over slow NICs.
I do not have RDMA NICs.

Thanks!

By: Romain Serre

Romain Serre — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 08:44:13 +0000

Hi,

You can’t choose explicitly the storage network. However, if you have RDMA NICs, the storage traffics will use these network adapters in priority. You can also play with Cluster network metric. More the metric is low, more the storage and cluster flow will use the related cluster network. I recommend you also to deploy a cluster with only one cluster network for management (cluster and client) and one (if Simplified SMB Multichannel) or two cluster networks for Live-Migration, Storage and so on. Live-Migration and S2D use the same protocol (SMB 3.11) and it is complicated to implement QoS and differentiate these traffics.

Regards,

Romain

By: Marin

Marin — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 05:56:54 +0000

Excellent post! But I am wondering something.
If I setup a 2-node S2D cluster on which I also want to host a hyper-v cluster, is it possible to dedicate the storage network to a particular subnet? For example, with iSCSI and MPIO you can dedicate your storage traffic to particular network cards / subnet. With S2D in my test environment, my cluster is using any network (management/migration/storage subnets) for storage traffic. I want to circumvent this because obviously my storage network cards are higher speed (eg 10G) and my other network cards are slower (1G). I want to tell the cluster to only use certain NICs for S2D storage traffic.

A better example is VMware vSAN. In vSAN I can dedicate network cards for vSAN traffic. I want to do the same thing with S2D.

Is this possbile?