The official blog of the Windows Server storage engineering teams
Hi folks, Ned here again. I am running a Storage Replica topology poll on our UserVoice site to help decide some work priority. The two topics you are voting to prioritize are Storage Replica one-to-many replication & Storage Replica transitive replication. Please let us know which is more important to you. Poll is closed, thanks for… Read more
Hello, Claus here again. Dan and I recently received some Samsung PM1725 NVMe devices. These have 8 PCIe lanes, so we thought we would put them in a system with 100Gbps network adapters and see how fast we could make this thing go. We used a 4-node Dell R730XD configuration attached to a 32 port… Read more
Hiya folks, Ned here again. Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5’s release brings you a number of new Storage Replica features, some of which we added directly from your feedback during the preview loop: Asynchronous stretch clusters now supported RoCE V2 RDMA networks now supported Network Constraint Integrated with the Cluster Health service Delegation Thin… Read more
Hello, Claus here again. Enjoying the great weather in Washington and enjoying the view from my office, I thought I would share some notes about standing up Storage Spaces Direct using virtual machines in Azure and create a shared-nothing Scale-Out File Server. This scenario is currently recommended for testing and evaluation purposes only. In a… Read more
Hi, I’m Manish Duggal, software engineer at Microsoft. Work Folders enables users to securely access their files on a Windows Server from Windows, iOS and Android devices. Enterprise IT admins often want to understand Work Folders usage, categorized by active users and type of devices syncing to Work Folders servers. Overview In this example, I… Read more
Hello, Claus here again. This time we’ll take a look at the work done around simplifying the deployment of Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). If you have been following along, you know that once you form a cluster you would 1) enable S2D, 2) create a storage pool, 3) define storage tiers, and 4) create volumes for your… Read more
Hello, Claus here again. This time we’ll take a look at the work we’ve done to support systems with three tiers of storage (NVMe + SSD + HDD) in Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). If you’re familiar with Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012/R2, it’s important to understand that both caching and storage tiering works very differently… Read more
Hello, Claus here again. We’ve got some more goodies for you in Storage Spaces Direct with the Windows Server Technical Preview 5 release. The key updates are: Automatic Configuration Managing Storage Spaces Direct using Virtual Machine Manager Chassis and Rack Fault Tolerance Deployment with 3 servers Deployments with NVMe, SSD and HDD Automatic Configuration To… Read more
Hi folks, Ned here again with a brief announcement: DISKSPD, the Microsoft-built and recommended tool for testing and measuring your storage performance, is now available on GitHub under an MIT License. It can generate load, measure storage perf, and generally makes life easier when building and configuring storage with Windows Server. Quit using IOMETER and… Read more
Data Deduplication is a feature of Windows Server since Windows Server 2012 that can reduce the on-disk footprint of your data by finding and removing duplication within a volume without compromising its fidelity or integrity. For more information on Data Deduplication, see the Data Deduplication Overview. Nano Server is a new headless deployment option in… Read more