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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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StarWind V2V converter is a free tool provided by StarWind to convert virtual hard drive. You can convert Hyper-V virtual hard drive (VHDX) to VMware ESXi virtual hard drive (VMDK) and vice versa. Other virtual hard drive formats are supported such as qcow2. Because StarWind V2V convert only the virtual hard drive, you can’t automate the migration between hypervisor. So, ...
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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 ...
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Nutanix AHV is a custom KVM hypervisor integrated to Nutanix ecosystem such as Prism. This is an enterprise-class hypervisor and an alternative solution to VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V when deploying Nutanix. Nutanix AHV is fully integrated to Nutanix Prism and there is no other GUI to manage this hypervisor. To eases the migration to the Nutanix hypervisor from VMware, ...
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Windows Admin Center (formerly Honolulu Project) was released in April 2018 by Microsoft. WAC is a web-based management tool to help to administrate Windows Server and hyperconverged cluster. In part of my job, I use primarily Windows Admin Center for Storage Spaces Direct Cluster and to manage Windows Server in Core edition especially drivers. Since the release of Windows Admin ...
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When we deploy Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), either hyperconverged or disaggregated, we have to configure the networking part. Usually we work with Dell hardware to deploy Storage Spaces Direct and the one of the switches supported by the Dell reference architectures is the Dell S4048 (Force 10). In this topic, we will see how to configure this switch from scratch. ...
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In this previous topic, I shown you how to configure StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL for friends). In this topic I connected StarWind VTL to my Veeam Backup & Replication server through iSCSI. Now I’d like add the libraries to Veeam to run tape jobs in order to archive backup. In this topic, I’ll show you how to add a ...
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This week, in part of my job I deployed a Storage Replica between two S2D Clusters. I’d like to share with you the steps I followed to implement the storage replication between two S2D hyperconverged cluster. Storage Replica enables to replicate volumes at the block-level. For my customer, Storage Replica is part of a Disaster Recovery Plan in case of ...
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