S2D

I’ve been deploying a few Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) clusters lately, and I noticed a slight mis-configuration that can occur on deployment. Normally when deploying S2D, the disk types in the nodes are detected and the fastest disk (usually NVMe or SSD) is assigned to the cache, while the next fastest is used for the Performance Tier and the slowest being used in the Capacity Tier. So if you have NVMe, SSD and HDD, you would end up with an NVMe Cache, a SSD Performance Tier and a HDD Capacity Tier.

We’ve all had the case where there was a volume running hot on your cluster and you spend ages wrestling with perf counters to try to find that VM that’s causing your storage to burn. Well let me introduce you to a magical new command in Windows Server 2016 Get-StorageQoSFlow This miracle command can give you insights on all the VHD(x)s running on your cluster, revealing IOPS, Latency and Bandwidth stats for them all without the need for large-scale monitoring solutions.

As many of you would have seen, Windows Server 2016 has been officially launched, with evaluation media available and General Availability slated for later this month. One of the great new features in this release, is Storage Spaces Direct, a Software-Defined Storage Solution. There is already plenty of information available on how to get this up and running on Microsoft Docs, but I thought I’d share some of the operational tasks that aren’t so obvious, starting with expanding volumes.

While sitting in LAX Airport with some time to kill I thought I’d reflect on the last week. I’ve spent the last week at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta, and what a crazy but fantastic week it has been. Starting with only finding out 2 weeks before the start of the conference that I was invited to speak, frantically trying to sort accommodation and flights, and finally ending with speaking at the conference itself.