Storage

S2D Real case: detect a lack of cache

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 ...

Read More »

Storage Spaces Direct: Parallel rebuild

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 ...

Read More »

Storage Spaces Direct and deduplication in Windows Server 2019

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 ...

Read More »

Deploy a Software-Defined Storage solution with StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN is a Software-Defined Storage solution which enables to replicate data across several nodes to ensure availability. The data are mirrored between two or more nodes. Hypervisor can be installed in the StarWind Virtual SAN nodes (hyperconverged) or separated from hypervisor (converged). StarWind Virtual SAN is easy to use and provide high performance. Moreover, StarWind provides pro active ...

Read More »

Don’t worry, Storage Spaces Direct is not dead !

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 a SMB storage solution for Hyper-V with StarWind VSAN free

StarWind VSAN free provides a free Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solution for two nodes. With this solution, you are able to deliver a highly available storage based on Direct-Attached Storage devices. On top of StarWind VSAN free, you can deploy a Microsoft Failover Clustering with Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). So you can deploy a converged SDS solution with Windows Server 2016 ...

Read More »