Happy New Year Everyone…This is my first blog post of 2017. Woo Hoo!! As always, I love to blog about questions from the field. This one came from a customer testing their new Virtual Desktop Infrustrure (VDI) on Nutanix and had 1 out of 50 users profiles be corrupt. He asked why did this happen and how can I avoid this in the future. Now, I would say that 1 corrupt profile out of 50 is fine during a test, but let understand why it happens. This topic is especially important to understand because directly relates to VDI and your end-user experience in VDI.
What is a Windows User Profile? It not just your desktop 🙂
Good day everyone. It been a few weeks, like busy with work and such. Anyways, this post will go into how Management & Operations are done in S2D. Now, my biggest pet peeve is complex GUI management and yet again, Microsoft doesn’t disappoint. It still a number of steps in different interfaces to bring up S2D, Check out Aidan Finns blog post on disaggregated management from last year. It still rings true to this day with the release of 2016. It shouldn’t be this complex IMO 🙁 That being said, let move to the details. Continue reading →
Yo everyone…This is going to be a short blog post in this series. I am just covering Networking and Storage QoS as it pertains to S2D. There are the technologies the bind S2D together. Storage QoS
S2D is using the Storage (QoS) Quality of Service that ships with Windows Server 2016 which provides standard min/max IOPS and bandwidth control. QoS policy can be applied at the VHD, VM, Groups of VMs, or Tenant Level. Benefits include:
Mitigate noisy neighbor issues. By default, Storage QoS ensures that a single virtual machine cannot consume all storage resources and starve other virtual machines of storage bandwidth.
Monitor end to end storage performance. As soon as virtual machines stored on a Scale-Out File Server are started, their performance is monitored. Performance details of all running virtual machines and the configuration of the Scale-Out File Server cluster can be viewed from a single location
Manage Storage I/O per workload business needs Storage QoS policies define performance minimums and maximums for virtual machines and ensures that they are met. This provides consistent performance to virtual machines, even in dense and overprovisioned environments. If policies cannot be met, alerts are available to track when VMs are out of policy or have invalid policies assigned.
What’s New in Networking with S2D?
In Windows Server 2016, they added Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) support to the Hyper-V virtual switch.
For those that don’t know what RMDA is it technology that allows direct memory access from one computer to another, bypassing TCP layer, CPU , OS layer and driver layer. Allowing for low latency and high-throughput connections. This is done with hardware transport offloads on network adapters that support RDMA.
Back to Hyper-V virtual switch support for RDMA. This allows you to configure regular or RDMA enabled vNICs on top of a pair of RDMA capable physical NICs. They also added embedded NIC teaming or Switch Embedded Teaming (SET).
SET is where NIC teaming and the Hyper-V switch is a single entity and can now be used in conjunction with RDMA NICs, wherein Windows 2012 Server you needed to have separate NIC teams for RDMA and Hyper-V Switch.
The images below illustrates the architecture changes between Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016. Next up…Management and Operations…
Fault Tolerance…What does it mean? Let me break it down simply. Pictured above is just a bad design, not fault tolerance. This is not really what fault tolerance means. Having two or more of something is one factor, but how it’s implanted is just as important. Fault Tolerance incorporates two very important principles, High availability and Redundancy.
Now if we had a few toilets side by side and kept only 1 open and the other 2 on standby. Also, if it could move the user automatically to another toilet during a failure, then it technically it would be fault tolerant. Anyways, let’s move on from toilets to the real world. 🙂
Storage Spaces Direct BasicsLike anything else, I’m going to start with the basics of the stack and then dive into details of each component over the next few blog posts. There’s a lot to digest…So let’s get rolling…
The intention of this blog post series is to give some history of how Microsoft Storage Spaces evolved to what it has become known today as Storages Spaces Direct (S2D). This first blog post will go into the history of Storage Spaces. Over my next few posts, I will delve further into the recent Storage Spaces Direct release with Windows 2016 server. l will conclude my series with where I think it’s headed and how it compares to other HCI solutions in general. Now let’s go for a ride down memory lane….
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