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 »
Azure File Sync is a Microsoft feature released in July 2018. It enables to synchronize multiple On-Premise file servers with Azure. In other words, we can replace DFS-R for branch office. Azure File Sync brings also a tiering feature that enables to cache in On-Prem servers the most used files (based on the access data) and to keep in Azure ...
Read More »
With Windows Server 2019 and Windows Admin Center, we are able to build hybrid cloud in an easy way. First Windows Admin Center provide a GUI to configure features such as Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery or Azure File Sync. With Windows Server 2019, we can interconnect an On-Prem host to an Azure virtual network thanks to Azure Virtual Network ...
Read More »
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 ...
Read More »
Microsoft just released Windows Server 2019 with a lot of improvement for Storage Spaces Direct. One of these improvements is the nested resiliency that is specific for 2-node S2D cluster. Thanks to this feature, a 2-node S2D cluster can now support two failures, at the cost of storage dedicated for resiliency. Nested Resiliency comes in two flavors: Nested two-Way mirroring: ...
Read More »
Most of my customers try to backup their infrastructure at night to avoid impacting the user workloads. Sometimes there are so much data that the night is not enough to backup the whole infrastructure. Usually customers have a decent production infrastructure in term of speed and the bottleneck is the storage repository. For this kind of storage, we prefer to ...
Read More »
These days I’m trying in depth Windows Server 2019. Today I chose to pay attention to Remote Desktop Services. The goal of my lab is to deploy a RDS Farm with all components and with the new HTML5 Remote Desktop Client. Even though I’m running my lab on Windows Server 2019, you can also deploy the HTML5 client on Windows ...
Read More »
It’s been a while that Microsoft releases new Windows Server 2019 builds regularly. The latest public build holds a new feature called System Insights. It enables the analysis for the usage of some system resources such as CPU, storage and network and build forecasting. Moreover, in specific situations, a script can be run to resolve the incident. System Insights is ...
Read More »
Dell provides a smart utility to update firmware and drivers in their servers. This utility is called Server Update Utility or shortly: SUU. SUU is an ISO that holds all drivers and firmware for all supported hardware. When you use SUU in a Windows Server, it detects hardware, firmware’s versions and driver’s versions. Then SUU asks you if you wish ...
Read More »
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 »
