So you’ve set up an Azure Stack HCI Cluster and everything’s running great, but there is this nagging feeling in the back of your mind. It’s a hybrid setup, with some type of flash cache sitting in front of spinning disk, and you start to wonder how hard you’re pushing that cache, and how long it will last.
Thankfully with Windows Server 2019, there are many in-built tools and commands to help work out just that!
As some of you would have seen, I spent some time last week getting familiar with Linux Containers on Windows Server 2019, and I thought I would share what I did to get it all up and running.
Prerequisites To get started, you’ll need to have the following in place:
A Windows Server 2019 VM or Bare Metal host (VM-Only) Nested Virtualization enabled (VM-Only) MAC Address Spoofing enabled Hyper-V and Container Windows Features Enabled.
If you’ve ever dealt with a SAN or Storage guy before, you’ll know that they usually have a huge passion for cache stats. This is because the secret sauce of accelerating cheap storage for years has been to stick a small amount of expensive but super fast flash in front of your slower spinning disk, or in recent years, your cheaper low endurance SSDs.
Because of this, it was always a good idea to keep an eye on how your cache was going, making sure things like Cache Hit Misses were low, and that your Write Cache wasn’t overallocated.
If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter or any Tech Blogs and News sites recently, you would have noticed that Microsoft have dropped their first cut of the next Long-Term Service Branch OS, Windows Server 2019, into the Windows Insider ring for people like you and me to start testing.
Now most people (like me) don’t have a huge amount of spare hardware sitting round for times like this, especially for testing things like Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).
