Tag Archives: Storage Spaces Direct

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 ...

When a customer calls me to design or validate the hardware configuration for hyperconverged infrastructure with Storage Spaces Direct, there is often a misunderstanding about the remaining useable capacity, the required cache capacity and ratio, and the different mode of resilience. With this topic, I’ll try to help you to plan the storage for hyperconverged and to clarify some points. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Before Windows Server 2016, the alerting and the monitoring of the cluster were managed by monitoring tools such as System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). The monitoring tool used WMI, PowerShell scripts, performance counters or whatever to get the health of the cluster. In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has added the Health Service in the cluster that provides metrics and fault ...

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 ...