In this blogpost I’m testing out the new resiliency method which we can use with 2-node clusters in Windows Server 2019. This blog is not meant as performance showcase for the hardware but to show the differences between a regular Two-way mirror and nested resiliency volume. Why do I want nested resiliency? Nested resiliency helps two node clusters by saving more copies of the data on one node, thus creating more resiliency but in the meantime also taking more space. With two-way mirror we could get into trouble when we have hardware failures in both fault domains, with nested Resiliency we ke ..read more

Sometimes you have an application that keeps connections open while they should be closed. Because Windows does not seem to have the capability to kill an connection without killing the whole process we’ll to use a 3rd party tool called cports.exe. Download here: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports-x64.zip   $ProcessName= "BackgroundTransferHost" $State = "CloseWait " while ($true) { sleep -Seconds 20 $id = (Get-Process $ProcessName).Id Get-NetTCPConnection -OwningProcess $id -State $State | % { .\cports.exe /close * * $_.RemoteAddress $_.RemotePort } } The post Kill TCP connec ..read more

If you are working with Dell, they provide a management tool called Dell OpenManage Enterprise where you can easily manage your hardware and firmware. You can add servers to a group and then assign a ‘Catalog’ to that group. This catalog contains firmware information for Dell OME to download and install on the group. By default there is a catalog that uses the Dell public catalog with latest version. Using Azure Stack HCI, it might be that some firmware version are not (yet) tested and validated for use. Therefor it’s important to always use the right firmware catalog, and Dell has one specifi ..read more

Let’s face it, Microsoft is a software company and always has been. They run a bunch of hardware in datacenters worldwide because they needed a place for their software to run so customers can use it.   Azure Services anywhere Microsoft Build 2021 came along with new announcements which makes the direction more clear than ever. Microsoft sells software, no matter where it runs. Satya Nadella announced the ability to run Azure Services anywhere, as long it’s a Kubernetes cluster managed by Azure. The management of these clusters is happening through the magical Azure Arc. More appealing i ..read more

Great news, last week Microsoft has released Azure Stack HCI as “General available”. The product is now ready for production use and all the prerequisites on the Microsoft side has been met such as 24/7 support etc. The past few months I talked to a lot of people about Azure Stack HCI and the Windows Server HCI solutions and I can’t stop to notice how people are comparing Azure Stack HCI to Windows Server HCI. In this blog I will explain my point-of-view on both solutions and how they differentiate. Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct Microsoft is heavily invested in Hyper-V from the early days ..read more

The last few years have been interesting, especially for a Microsoft infrastructure-oriented guy like me. We’ve seen the change from just providing virtual machines and storage to the DevOps world and providing platforms in real-time instead of delivering when asked. The cloud was of course the biggest competition for the IT professional, as developers and other departments within the company could consume cloud services very easily, without the IT professional, and create the needed infrastructure themselves. Hopefully using API’s and application templates such as ARM templates. In this devel ..read more

  When working with Azure Functions and passing parameters in the HTTP request, this piece of Powershell comes in handy every time. $Request.Query.GetEnumerator() | ForEach-Object { New-Variable -Name $_.Key -Value $_.Value } This will make a variable from each parameter you pass in the request. So for example; If you request the following Azure functions URL: https://darryl.azurewebsites.net/api/Get-Info?code=WrUum7c6ZM3YyyjY4O6Im8YtL7asx0ShxXJ5pUCDaL4832lsQYZkng==&myname=darryl You will automatically have a parameter “myname” which you can use in your script.   Thank you for r ..read more

I never really do opinion posts, but when I started writing this.. text just kept coming.. enjoy So the word is officially out. Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) is going to be rebranded to Azure Stack HCI for Windows Server 2019. When I first heard about it I was, probably just like you, surprised and confused. I mean, what has Azure Stack to do with Windows Server and Storage Spaces Direct? A more consistent story When I gave it a few hours and discussed this with some knowledgeable folks it started to make more sense to me. The last few years Windows Server did not got the attention i ..read more

With Storage Spaces Direct, every Metadata / write IO is redirected to the node who owns the Cluster Shared Volume. If you’re using NTFS the volume will be in “Block Redirected Mode”, if ReFS is used the volume will be in “File System Redirected Mode”.  You can see this with Powershell; Get-ClusterSharedVolumeState. More info on a 2012R2 blog here and in the WSLAB scenarios. Assuming the recommended filesystem, ReFS, for Storage Spaces Direct is used the following occurs on a running cluster:   We have a 3-node Storage Spaces Direct cluster with two Cluster Shared Volumes which are ..read more

Starting this blog with questions: How do you deploy a highly available fileserver in Azure? Do you count on the SLA (99.9%) of Azure when using premium storage, so doing a single fileserver? How does it perform? In this post I’m diving in on Storage Spaces Direct in Azure, giving a few guidelines but also some real-world performance results. Got quite a few charts and tables in there, get an extra coffee. Hang on tight, here we go! Size matters Not only the types of disks you choose for the solution is important, the VM size is key in this. Each Premium Storage-supported VM size has scale l ..read more