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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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 ...
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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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 ...
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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. ...
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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 ...
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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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