Recently Microsoft announced that the official launch for Windows Server 2016 should be at the Ignite conference this 26 to 30 September. Windows Server 2016 will be available in three different editions and in two different servicing model depending on installation option. These servicing models are known as Long Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) and Current Branch for Business (CBB). So ...
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Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 brings a new feature called VM Start Order. It enables to make dependencies between VMs or groups of VMs to start the server in the good order. Think about a complex service based on multi-tier as Active Directory, Databases, Web Servers and application servers. To start the service, you should start in this order ...
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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 ...
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The last two months, I worked with my friend Charbel Nemnom on a whitepaper about Hyper-Convergence, especially by using Microsoft technologies. First of all, this document contains an overview of the IT infrastructure improvement in the last ten years past from before virtualization to Hyper-Convergence. Then we describe how works Microsoft Hyper-Converged solution by talking about Network convergence, RDMA, SMB, Storage Spaces Direct, ...
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To manage the storage performance priority of virtual machines, Microsoft has introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2 the Storage Quality of Service (Storage QoS). This feature enables to set a maximum input/output per second (IOPS) to a virtual hard disk. In a multi-tenant environment you can set the maximum IOPS according to a service level or to avoid that a ...
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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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