Tag Archives: 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 ...

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Prepare a high-speed storage repository for backup with Qnap

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 ...

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Use Honolulu to manage your Microsoft hyperconverged cluster

Few months ago, I have written a topic about the next gen Microsoft management tool called Honolulu project. Honolulu provides management for standalone Windows Server, failover clustering and hyperconverged. Currently hyperconverged management works only on Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) versions (I cross finger for Honolulu support on Windows Server LTSC). I have upgraded my lab to latest technical preview ...

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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 ...

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Enable Direct Storage Access in Veeam Backup & Replication

In environment with virtualization infrastructure connected to a SAN, you may want to connect your Veeam proxies (usually a physical servers) to the SAN to collect data. This configuration avoids using the production network to get data and reduce the backup window by increasing the speed of the backup process. This configuration requires a direct connection between Veeam proxies and ...

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Storage Spaces Direct: plan the storage for hyperconverged

When a customer calls me to design or validate the hardware configuration for hyperconverged infrastructure with Storage Spaces Direct, there is often a misunderstanding about the remaining useable capacity, the required cache capacity and ratio, and the different mode of resilience. With this topic, I’ll try to help you to plan the storage for hyperconverged and to clarify some points. ...

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Understand Microsoft Azure Storage for Virtual Machines

Microsoft Azure provides a storage solution that can be used for files, backups, virtual machines and so on. In this topic I’ll talk about Blob Storage that enables to store virtual disks for Virtual Machines. Storage account To use the Microsoft Azure storage solution, it’s necessary to create a Storage Account. This storage account gives you a single namespace where ...

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Synology NAS for Hyper-V purpose

Since two years I have a Synology DS412+ which provides me share for personnal use (such as holiday photos :p). This NAS is nice to share files accross network to computers, TV, smartphone etc. As I have a lot of holiday photos, I had to change all disks for more disk space. Below old configuration : 4 x Western Digital RE4 500Go RAID ...

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