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The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) hosted the 10th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 16th 2013. This week, the presentation slides were made publicly available. You can find them all at http...

I recently got a stream of e-mails and questions about the maximum number of cluster nodes you can have in a Scale-Out File Server cluster. For the record, we test and support up to 8 nodes per file server cluster. This is the case for both Windows Server 2012 (which introduced the Scale-Out File Server...

Introduction This blog post focus on the new SMB Scale-Out Rebalancing introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2. If you haven’t seen it yet, it delivers a new way of balancing file clients accessing a Scale-Out File Server. In Windows Server 2012, each client would be randomly directed via...

This post is a part of the nine-part “ What’s New in Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2 ” series that is featured on Brad Anderson’s In the Cloud blog. Today’s blog post covers Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage and how it applies to the larger topic of “Transform...

A Scale-Out File Server is a cluster role that offers the same SMB file share (or set of shares) on every node of the cluster. As clients come in, they are spread across the nodes using a round-robin mechanism based on DNS. In the common case of having many clients and just a few file server cluster...

Highly available Windows Server 2012 systems using shared, directly-attached storage can be built using either Storage Spaces or a validated clustered RAID controller. Option 1 – Storage Spaces You can build a highly available shared SAS system today using Storage Spaces. Storage...

1. Introduction If you follow this blog, you probably already had a chance to review the “Hyper-V over SMB” overview talk that I delivered at TechEd 2012 and other conferences. I am now working on a new version of that talk that still covers the basics, but adds brand new segments focused...

When deploying Hyper-V over SMB (storing your live configuration and live VHD/VHDX files on an SMB 3.0 file share), make sure you don’t use a loopback configuration. A loopback configuration means that the Hyper-V role and the File Server role are on the same computer. While you can actually have both...

SMB Multichannel will let you use multiple network interfaces at once for added throughput and network fault tolerance. When using it with non-clustered file servers, you have the most flexible options, including using multiple NICs on the same subnet. In fact, you can have all the multiple NICs on the...

1. Overview In this post, I am sharing all the steps I used to create a Windows Server 2012 File Server test environment that I used for some of my Hyper-V over SMB demonstrations. My goal with this post is to share some of configuration details and the exact PowerShell scripts I used to configure the...

There is a new blog post by Claus Joergensen, a Principal Program Manager in the File Server team, that covers the SMB Transparent Failover feature in Windows Server 2012 and SMB 3.0. Claus covers all the details about making file shares continuously available, including step-by-step instructions using...

If you're planning to attend the TechEd 2012 North America event in June, here are the scheduled sessions with speakers from the File Server team: Code Title Speaker(s) Day Time Track Level WSV328 The Path to Continuous Availability with Windows Server 2012 ...

IMPORTANT: This blog post is now obsolete. For the latest version of this content, please visit: http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/08/23/windows-server-2012-scale-out-file-server-for-sql-server-2012-step-by-step-installation.aspx 1. Introduction 1.1. Overview In this document...

This week at TechEd 2011 I will be delivering a presentation about “Windows Server 2008 R2 File Services Consolidation - Technology Update”. If you’re attending the conference in Atlanta-GA, this is session WSV317 on Wednesday at 10:15 AM, plus a repeat on Thursday also at 10:15...

Overview This blog post covers a few different ways to consolidate multiple SMB file servers and keep exposing the consolidated file shares under the old share paths. Scenario Let’s say you currently have 3 file servers named file1.contoso.local, file2.contoso.local and file3.contoso...

The Windows Storage Server Team just released a new 30-page white paper on "Configuring Failover Clusters with Windows Storage Server 2008". This paper will guide you through the process of configuring the networks, domains and clustering features, including performance recommendations for a pair...

Here are some notes on “SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering” I took while attending an advanced class on SQL Server taught by Greg Low (from http://sqlblog.com/blogs/greg_low/ and http://www.sqldownunder.com/ ). Please note that, although these notes were taken during the class, I might have added...

P.P.S.: This previously unsupported scenario is now fine with Windows Server "8" Beta and SMB 2.2. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/03/06/windows-server-quot-8-quot-beta-test-cases-for-hyper-v-over-smb.aspx P.S.: After writing this blog post, I found that the specific scenario...

I spent last week in Orlando, Florida, working at the Microsoft booth in the Storage Networking World. I delivered one of the demos there and my demo included the following technologies: Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 iSCSI Software Target Windows Server 2008 Core Install Windows...

1. Windows Server 2008 Storage Explorer 1A. Goal Making sure the devices are properly discovered. 1B1. Setup for FC FC Network: Make sure hosts, switches and SAN are properly connected. SAN: Configure device (including configuration of WWNs), create/unmask LUNs. Host: Load/configure...

I just wanted to share that the good team working on Windows Server Clustering and High Availability is re-energizing their blog. With the significant improvements in Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering and the RTM and launch upon us, timing could not be better... Be sure to check them at http...

Introduction This post describes how to configure the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target offered with Windows Storage Server, including the steps to configure both the iSCSI Target and the iSCSI Initiator. Note: The iSCSI Target is the server (where the iSCSI virtual disks are actually stored) and...

I recently delivered a presentation on Highly Available Clusters focused on the scenarios related to Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 (WSS 2003 R2) and Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 (WUDSS 2003). The scenarios ended up being quite generic, so I decided to share them here. High Availability...

I’m getting ready to work at the Microsoft booth at the Storage Network World next week in Dallas, TX and one of the items we’re showing is the improvements in Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering, this time using the recently released RC0 (Release Candidate 0). I recorded a short (17-minute) demonstration...

I just wanted to share my experience around the use of Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering. I worked on this basically for a demonstration and I ended up doing quite a lot of work around it. This was mainly because I like to build my demo systems from scratch as opposed to just downloading ready...