Browse by Tags

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...

Windows Server 2012 R2 introduced a new version of SMB. Technically it’s SMB 3.02, but we continue to call it just SMB3. The main changes are described at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831474.aspx . With this new release, we made a few changes in SMB PowerShell to support the new...

In this post, I'm providing a reference to the most relevant content related to Windows Server 2012 that is related to the File Server, the SMB 3.0 features and its associated scenarios like Hyper-V over SMB and SQL Server over SMB. It's obviously not a complete reference (there are new blog posts every...

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...

I was visiting the expo area at MMS 2013 earlier today and saw that Iron Networks was showing a private cloud pod there, complete with a set of well-matched layers of compute, storage and networking. They were demonstrating several of the latest capabilities in Windows Server 2012 and System Center...

I got a question the other day about one of the scripts I published as part of a step-by-step for Hyper-V over SMB , Here's the relevant line from that script: New-SmbShare -Name VMS3 -Path C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\VMS -FullAccess FST2.Test\Administrator, FST2.Test\FST2-HV1$, FST2.Test\FST2-HV2$...

Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 include a new set of performance counters that can greatly help understand the performance of the SMB file protocol. These include new counters on both the server side and the client side. In this post, I wanted to call your attention to the new client-side counters...

A while back, I showed how to use PowerShell V2 and our old SMB WMIv1 object to explain how to find the free space behind a file share (essentially the free space for the volume that contains the file share). That post is available at http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2010/04/08/using-powershell...

Windows Server 2012 includes a built-in mechanism called Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) to check your configuration and make sure everything is set to the proper values. These set of rules, which come in specific sets for each role you install, can be run through Server Manager or also via PowerShell...

Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) in Windows Server 2012 has a great new feature to allow using system memory as a write-through cache. Since Scale-Out File Server Clusters use CSV, enabling this CSV cache has a huge impact on the performance of this type of File Server. This has a direct impact on common...

When deploying the Continuous Availability feature of the new File Server clusters in Windows Server 2012, be careful not to use volumes that have either 8.3 naming or NTFS compression enabled. If you have these features enabled on the volume, the File Server won’t be able to properly track the ongoing...

This has been a performance tip for File Servers for some time now: disable short names. There are big performance savings in disabling 8.3 naming and also for removing existing short names on a volume. Here’s a diagram from a presentation I delivered last year: The old “8dot3 naming” convention has...

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...

The new SMB Multichannel feature improves performance for network interfaces by using multiple TCP connections for a single network interface automatically. SMB will only do this if your network interface reports itself as RSS-capable, which means it can use Receive Side Scaling. You can check that with...

When you install a fresh copy of Windows Server 2012 and configure it with the File Server role, the default Power Setting balances power efficiency and performance. For this reason, even if you have a few high speed network interfaces and the fastest SSD storage out there, you might not be getting...

1. Introduction I have been presenting our solution in Windows Server 2012 for File Storage for Virtualization (Hyper-V over SMB) and Databases (SQL Server over SMB) for a while now. I always start the conversation talking about how simple and easy it is for an IT Administrator or an Application...

1 – Overview Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 introduced a new set of PowerShell cmdlets to manage File Servers and File Shares. If you're not familiar with them, I would recommend reviewing my blog on The Basics of SMB PowerShell . With the rule that cmdlets have to be written in a way...

As you probably know, the File Services team provides a Best Practices Analyzer tool (BPA). It includes several rules for the configuration, operation, performance and security of the SMB, NFS, DFS-N, DFS-R and FSRM. I was recently looking at the pageview statistics for each of the rules for the SMB...

1. Overview Some time ago, I was automating a few tasks with PowerShell and needed to set NTFS permissions on a folder. I was tempted to use the good old ICACLS.EXE command line, but I wanted to keep it all within PowerShell. While there are a number of different permissions you could want to set...

I recently blogged about the PowerShell cmdlets included with the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 . That included the details on all the 10 cmdlets available, including the one used to create VHD files, which is New-IscsiVirtualDisk. If you’re paying close attention to the list of new features...

While many of the Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) administrators have moved from the old CLUSTER.EXE command-line to the new PowerShell interface, I know at least a few holdouts out there. It’s probably the fact that they have used the old CLI since the early days of Microsoft Cluster Services...

Every once in a while the question comes up. How come my IT department is charging me tens of dollars per gigabyte of storage for my application per month when I can pay less than 15 cents per gigabyte at Best Buy (where a 2TB drive might cost less than $150)? The conversation then includes...

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...

I wanted to call your attention to four new blog posts this morning from Nir Ben Zvi (Senior Program Manager Lead, Microsoft File Server Team) and Matthias Wollnik (Program Manager, Microsoft File Server Team) introducing the Windows Server 2008 R2 File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) . This new...

What is ITIL? I just took some training and passed an exam on ITIL, a framework for IT Services Management. But what can you really learn from a set of books on IT Infrastructure published by a UK government agency? Oh, quite a lot! The idea behind it is to offer best practices for IT processes...