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 ...
Read More »Get Storage Spaces Direct insights from StarWind Manager
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 ...
Read More »Deploy Veeam Cloud Connect for large environments in Microsoft Azure
Veeam Cloud Connect is a solution to store backups and archives in a second datacenter such as Microsoft Azure. Thanks to this technology, we can easily follow the 3-2-1 backup rule (3 backups; 2 different medias; 1 offsite). Last time I talked about Veeam Cloud Connect, I deployed all Veeam roles within a single VM. This time I’m going to ...
Read More »Host Veeam backup on Storage Spaces Direct
Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) is well known to host virtual machines in the disaggregated or hyperconverged model. But S2D can also be used for backup purpose as a backup repository. You can plan to implement a S2D cluster in the dissagregated model to host virtual machines but also to store backups. Because Veeam Backup & Replication can leverage a repository ...
Read More »RDS 2016 Farm: Configure File Servers for User Profile Disks
In the previous topics of this series, we have deployed the RDS Farm in Azure. Now we need a file service in high availability to manage user profile disks (UPD). To support the high availability, I leverage Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). For more information about the deployment of S2D, you can read this topic (based ...
Read More »Real case: Storage Spaces Direct physical disk replacement
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 ...
Read More »2-node hyperconverged cluster with Windows Server 2016
Last week, Microsoft announced the final release of Windows Server 2016 (the bits can be downloaded here). In addition, Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2016 supports now a 2-node hyperconverged cluster configuration. I can now publish the setup of my lab configuration which is almost a production platform. Only SSD are not enterprise grade and one Xeon is missing per ...
Read More »Storage Spaces Direct with triple tiers in Windows Server 2016
Before Technical Preview 5, Windows Server enabled to create Storage Pool with a mix of type of disk as SSD and HDD, NVMe and SSD or NVMe and HDD. Moreover, Technical Preview 4 brings multi-resilient virtual disk which is a multi-tier Storage Spaces (mirroring tier and parity tier). Since Technical Preview 5, Windows Server 2016 enables to use a mix ...
Read More »Manage Storage Space Direct from Virtual Machine Manager
In a previous topic, I shown how to implement a Storage Space Direct on Windows Server 2016 TP2 (it is almost the same thing in Technical Preview 3). In this previous topic I created Storage Pool, storage space and some share from Failover Clustering console. In this topic, I’ll show you how doing the same operation from Virtual Machine Manager Technical ...
Read More »Implement Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server Technical Preview 2
Microsoft recently announced a new feature called Storage Spaces Direct that enables to make a storage solution in High Availability with local storage of each node. This local storage can be internal disks or external disks in a JBOD tray for example. This technology supports SATA or SAS disks. It is a great improvement for Software-Defined Storage (SDS). Software-Defined Storage ...
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