Master Storage Spaces Direct
The goal of this particular book is to give you some amazing Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) tips from the experts you come to see in person at the MVPDays Roadshow. This book has been used by MVP Dave Kawula as a starter for each of his Storage Spaces Direct Projects.
The authors are letting you choose the price you pay for this book!
The goal of this particular book is to give you some amazing Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) tips from the experts you come to see in person at the MVPDays Roadshow. This book has been used by MVP Dave Kawula as a starter for each of his Storage Spaces Direct Projects.
About
About the Book
The purpose of this book is to showcase the amazing expertise of our guest speakers at the North American MVPDays Community Roadshow. They have so much passion, expertise, and expert knowledge that it only seemed fitting to write it down in a book.
MVPDays was founded by Cristal and Dave Kawula back in 2013. It started as a simple idea; “There’s got to be a good way for Microsoft MVPs to reach the IT community and share their vast knowledge and experience in a fun and engaging way.” We wondered what the point was in recognizing these bright and inspiring individuals, and not leveraging them to inspire the community that they were a part of? If we didn’t yet have the right venue to help these individuals inspire and teach, why not create it?
Having established our soapbox, we often get asked the question “Who should attend MVPDays”?
The answer is simple. Anyone that has an interest in technology, is eager to learn, and wants to meet other like-minded individuals should attend. This Roadshow is not just for Microsoft MVP’s, but for anyone in the IT Community.
Make sure you check out the MVPDays website at: www.mvpdays.com. You never know, maybe the Roadshow will be coming to a city near you.
The goal of this particular book is to give you some amazing Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) tips from the experts you come to see in person at the MVPDays Roadshow. This book is used as a required reading prior to MVP Dave Kawula engaging on any Storage Spaces Direct project. From us at the MVPDays Publishing team we really hope you find immense value in this book and as always let us know what you think.
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About the Authors
Dave Kawula
Dave is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry. His background includes data communications networks within multi-server environments, and he has led architecture teams for virtualization, System Center, Exchange, Active Directory, and Internet gateways. Very active within the Microsoft technical and consulting teams, Dave has provided deep-dive technical knowledge and subject matter expertise on various System Center and operating system topics.
Dave is well-known in the community as an evangelist for Microsoft, 1E, and Veeam technologies. Locating Dave is easy as he speaks at several conferences and sessions each year, including TechEd, Ignite, MVP Days Community Roadshow, and VeeamOn.
Recently Dave has been honored to take on the role of Conference Co-Chair of TechMentor with fellow MVP Sami Laiho. The lineup of speakers and attendees that have been to this conference over the past 20 years is really amazing. Come down to Redmond or Orlando in 2018 and you can meet him in person.
As the founder and Managing Principal Consultant at TriCon Elite Consulting, Dave is a leading technology expert for both local customers and large international enterprises, providing optimal guidance and methodologies to achieve and maintain an efficient infrastructure.
BLOG: www.checkyourlogs.net
Twitter: @DaveKawula

Episode 87
An Interview with Dave Kawula
Thomas Rayner
Thomas Rayner
Thomas Rayner is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Honorary Scripting Guy with many years of experience in IT. He is a master technologist, specializing in DevOps, systems and process automation, public, private and hybrid cloud, and PowerShell. Thomas is an international speaker, best-selling author, and instructor covering a vast array of IT topics.
Allan Rafuse
Allan is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and a Veeam Vanguard. Throughout his career, his skills have allowed him to work in variety of different industries (Oil and Gas, Banking and Healthcare) and also move to several Canadian provinces and even live in Europe. He has worked in many job roles that support the data center stack and cloud components and is also well versed in designing and deploying robust, highly available enterprise solutions in single or multi datacenter environments.
Integrating products and automation are passions of Allan. His solutions usually employ virtual environments (Hyper-V, VMware), Active Directory, SQL Server, System Center (SCCM, SCOM, SCVMM, SCORCH), Windows Server, Exchange, PowerShell, Veeam products and even Linux. He is an expert at scripting solutions and has an uncanny ability to reduce complexity and maximize the functionality of PowerShell.
Allan is a huge tech evangelist and the founder and Managing Principal Consultant at BroadArc Consulting. His consulting skills, vision, methodologies and frameworks have allowed many projects and solutions to thrive and succeed.
If you haven’t had the chance to personally meet Allan’s at an IT community speaking, you can always virtually follow him and introduce yourself on his blog or twitter.
BLOG: www.checkyourlogs.net | Twitter: @AllanRafuse | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/allanrafuse/
Cristal Kawula
Cristal Kawula is the co-founder of MVPDays Community Roadshow and #MVPHour live Twitter Chat. She is the President of TriCon Elite Consulting where she manages the day to day operations of the field consulting and sales teams.
Cristal is also only the 2nd Woman in the world to receive the prestigious Veeam Vanguard Community excellence award. In July of 2017 she was awarded the designation of Microsoft MVP.
Early in her career Cristal worked as a consultant with Microsoft authoring content for internal SMSGR and GTR teams. This content was used to train internal support engineers and global escalation engineering teams.
Cristal can be found speaking at Microsoft Ignite, MVPDays, and other local user groups. She is extremely active in the community and has recently helped publish a book for other Women MVP’s called Voices from the Data Platform.
BLOG: http://www.checkyourlogs.net
Twitter: @supercristal1
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements iii
From Dave iii
About the Authors iv
Dave Kawula - MVP iv
Thomas Rayner - MVP v
Allan Rafuse – MVP vi
Cristal Kawula – MVP vii
Technical Editors / Reviewers vii
Emile Cabot - MVP vii
Cary Sun – CCIE No. 4531 viii
Kai Poynting viii
Clint Wyckoff - MVP ix
Contents x
Introduction 1
What is MVPDays? 1
North American MVPDays Community Roadshow 1
Structure of the Book 3
Sample Files 3
Additional Resources 4
Chapter 1 1
What is HyperConverged? 1
History of HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) 2
HyperConverged vs. Converged Infrastructure 3
Traditional infrastructure was not built for virtualization 4
HyperConverged Infrastructure 5
Chapter 2 8
Introducing Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) 8
Key Benefits of S2D 8
Simplicity 9
Performance 9
Fault Tolerance 9
Resource Efficiency 10
Manageability 10
Scalability 10
Deployment Options for S2D 11
Converged 11
Hyper-Converged 12
S2D Components 14
Networking Hardware 16
Storage Hardware 16
Failover Clustering 16
Software Storage Bus 16
SMB as transport 17
Software Storage Bus Bandwidth Management 19
Storage Bus Layer Cache 19
Storage Pool 19
Storage Spaces 19
Resilient File System (ReFS) 20
Cluster Shared Volumes 20
Scale-Out File Server 20
S2D Hardware Requirements 21
Windows Server Software Defined Program 21
Basic Requirements 21
Servers 22
CPU 22
Memory 22
Networking 22
Drives 23
Minimum Number of Drives 23
Maximum Size 24
Host-bus adapter (HBA) 24
Fault Tolerance and Efficiency 26
Mirroring 26
Two-way mirror 26
Three-way mirror 27
Parity – Erasure Coding 28
Single parity 28
Dual parity 29
Local reconstruction codes 31
When to use parity 31
Mixed resiliency 31
Storage efficiency 32
S2D Storage Calculator 33
When to use mixed resiliency 34
Sample Configurations 35
Examples where everything stays online 35
Examples where everything goes offline 38
Defining Resiliency Settings using PowerShell 38
S2D Cache 40
Drive Deployment Options 40
All-Flash 41
Hybrid 42
Cache Drive Selection 42
Cache behavior 44
Write-only caching for all-flash deployments 44
Read/write caching for hybrid deployments 46
Caching in deployments with drives of all three types 46
Cache Architecture 48
Drive bindings are dynamic 49
Handling cache drive failures 49
Relationship to other caches 50
Manual Cache configuration 50
Set cache behavior 51
Sizing the cache 52
Chapter 3 55
Windows Server 2016 Failover Clustering 55
What's new for Windows Server 2016 56
Cluster operating system rolling upgrades 56
Storage Replica 58
Cloud Witness for a Failover Cluster 59
Fault Domains 59
Virtual Machine Resiliency 63
Site-aware Failover Clusters 64
Workgroup and Multi-domain clusters 64
VM load balancing 64
Virtual Machine Start Order 65
Simplified SMB Multichannel and multi-NIC cluster networks 65
Diagnostic Improvements 66
Cluster Log Enhancements 66
Generating the Cluster.log 67
What’s New in Windows Server 2016 68
TimeZone Information 68
Cluster Objects 70
Diagnostic Verbose Logging 71
Events from Other Channels 73
Active Memory Dump 75
Configuring Active Memory Dump 76
Health Service 80
Prerequisites 80
Metrics 80
Metrics 80
Examples 81
Capacity Planning 81
Faults 82
Fault Coverage 83
Using the Health Service 85
Root Cause Analysis 86
Get-StorageHealthAction 87
Supported Components Document 90
Health Service Settings 93
Chapter 4 96
S2D Networking Primer 96
Windows Server 2016 Network Architecture 98
Teaming Configurations 98
Switch-independent teaming. 98
Switch-dependent teaming. 99
Algorithms for load distribution 101
Converged Network Interface Card (NIC) 103
Switch Independent / Address Hash 103
Switch Independent / Hyper-V Port 103
Switch Independent / Dynamic 104
Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) 105
SET Availability 106
SET Supported NICs 106
SET Compatibility 106
SET Modes and Settings 108
Member Adapters 108
Load Balancing Modes for SET 109
SET and Virtual Machine Queues (VMQs) 109
SET and Hyper-V Network Virtualization 110
SET and Live Migration 110
MAC Address Use on Transmitted Packets 110
SET vs. LBFO Teaming 112
Managing SET Teams 113
Creating a SET Team 113
Adding or removing a member of a SET team 113
Removing a SET team 114
Changing the load distribution algorithm of a SET team 114
Forcing the affinity of a VM or vNIC to a physical NIC 114
Setting up an affinity between a vNIC and a Physical NIC 115
Checking the affinity between a vNIC and a Physical NIC 115
Removing the affinity between a vNIC and a Physical NIC 116
Configuring RDMA for S2D 117
Enable Datacenter Bridging (DCB) 119
Create a Hyper-V Virtual Switch with SET and RDMA vNICs 120
Chapter 5 122
Deploying Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) 122
Cisco Nexus 9372x Switch Configuration 131
Powering on the S2D nodes 137
IPMI Configuration 137
Post-Configuration of the S2D Nodes 139
Building a 2-Node S2D Cluster 141
Install Core Windows Roles and features 141
Configuring Datacenter Bridging 143
Configuring the SET Team 144
Creating RDMA Enabled Virtual Adapters 147
Verifying RDMA Enabled Virtual Adapters 148
Creating Virtual Adapters for Live Migration and Cluster Heartbeat 149
Configuring the IP Addresses for the S2D Nodes 151
Download and Install all Windows Updates 152
Validate the Failover Cluster 152
Build the S2D Failover Cluster 155
Validate the Cluster prior to Configuring Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) 156
Enable Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) 157
Provision Storage Virtual Disks (CSV) 159
Viewing S2D Volume info with Show Pretty Volume 161
Expand the Virtual Disk 169
Expand the Pool by adding more disks 171
Chapter 6 177
Stress testing S2D using VMFleet 177
Overview of VMFleet Scripts 177
Master Control 181
Building VMFleet 182
Creating the Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) for the tests 182
Install the VMFleet Scripts 183
Create the VMFleet Golden Image 183
Create the Fleet VMs 184
Run the VM Fleet 186
Storage QoS 186
Automated Sweeps 187
CPU Target Sweeps 189
Chapter 7 191
Deploying an 8 Node S2D Lab Using Hyper-V 191
Chapter 8 198
Factory Reset of Storage Spaces Direct 198
Clear-SDSConfig.PS1 198
Appendix A 207
BigDemo_S2D Script 207
Appendix B 237
Dave’s S2D Demo Build Script 237
Find our Experts 254
Join us at MVPDays and meet great MVP’s like this in person 254
Live Presentations 254
Video Training 254
Live Instructor-led Classes 255
Consulting Services 255
Twitter 256
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