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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...

Note: This blog post is a Windows Server 2012 R2 update on a previous version focused on Windows Server 2012 . 1. Introduction With the release of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2, I am frequently asked about how older versions of Windows will behave when connecting to or from these new...

This blog post is a compilation of my raw notes from SNIA’s SDC 2013 (Storage Developers Conference). Notes and disclaimers: These notes were typed during the talks and they may include typos and my own misinterpretations. Text in the bullets under each talk are quotes from the speaker...

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...

I have been working with Bob Hunt at the TechNet Radio team to provide a series of webcasts with information about SMB 3.0 and the File Server role in Windows Server 2012. These are fairly informal conversations, but Bob is really good at posing interesting questions, clarifying the different scenarios...

Overview I delivered a demo of Hyper-V over SMB this week at MMS 2013 that’s an evolution of a demo I did back in the Windows Server 2012 launch and also via a TechNet Radio session . Back then I showed a two physical servers running a SQLIO simulation. One played the role of the File...

Question received via e-mail: Is it practical use SMB3 storage without RDMA or do we have a use case for production rather than development or test? I thought RDMA would be essential for production deployment of Hyper-V SMB storage. Answer: RDMA is not a requirement for the Hyper-V over SMB...

Question received via blog mail: Jose- I picked up a couple ConnectX-2 adapters and a cable off of ebay for cheap (about $300 for everything) to test out SMB Direct. I followed your blog "Deploying Windows Server 2012 with SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA) and the Mellanox ConnectX-2/ConnectX-3 using...

1. Introduction I have been doing storage-related demos and publishing blogs with some storage performance numbers for a while, and I commonly get questions such as “How do you run these tests?” or “What tools do you use to generate IOs for your demos?”. While it’s...

There are two blog posts explaining in great detail what you need to do to use Mellanox ConnectX-2 or ConnectX-3 cards to implement RDMA networking for SMB 3.0 (using SMB Direct). You can find them at: Deploying Windows Server 2012 with SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA) and the Mellanox ConnectX-3 using...

One smart MVP was doing some testing and noticed that SMB Multichannel did not trigger immediately after an SMB session was established. So, he asked: How much traffic needs to pass between the SMB Client and Server before Multichannel actually starts? Well... SMB Multichannel works slightly different...

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...

I have three presentations lined up for the ComputerWorld/SNIA SNW Fall 2012 Conference, scheduled for October 16-19, 2012 in Santa Clara, California. Here are the details for each one, taken from the official event web site. Industry Perspective: High Throughput File Servers with SMB Direct, Using...

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 9th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 17th. As usual, Microsoft is underwriting the SMB/SMB2/SMB3 Plugfest, which is co-located with the SDC event...

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...

1) Introduction We have covered the basics of SMB Direct and some of the use cases in previous blog posts and TechNet articles. You can find them at http://smb3.info . However, I get a lot of questions about specifically which cards work with this new feature and how exactly you set those up. This...

1) Introduction We have covered the basics of SMB Direct and some of the use cases in previous blog posts and TechNet articles. You can find them at http://smb3.info . However, I get a lot of questions about specifically which cards work with this new feature and how exactly you set those up. This...

1) Introduction We have covered the basics of SMB Direct and some of the use cases in previous blog posts and TechNet articles. You can find them at http://smb3.info . However, I get a lot of questions about specifically which cards work with this new feature and how exactly you set those up. This...

1) Introduction We have covered the basics of SMB Direct and some of the use cases in previous blog posts and TechNet articles. You can find them at http://smb3.info . However, I get a lot of questions about specifically which cards work with this new feature and how exactly you set those up. This...

The Interop conference happened this week in Las Vegas (see http://www.interop.com/lasvegas ) and Mellanox showcased their high-speed ConnectX-3 network adapters during the event. They showed an interesting setup with Windows Server 2012 Beta and SMB 3.0 that showed amazing remote file performance using...

This blog post is now obsolete. For the latest post on this topic, visit http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/07/31/deploying-windows-server-2012-with-smb-direct-smb-over-rdma-and-the-mellanox-connectx-2-connectx-3-using-infiniband-step-by-step.aspx 1) Introduction We have covered...

This blog post is obsolete. For the latest post on this topic, see http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/07/31/deploying-windows-server-2012-with-smb-direct-smb-over-rdma-and-the-intel-neteffect-ne020-card-using-iwarp-step-by-step.aspx 1) Introduction We have covered the basics...

If you’re reading up on Windows Server 2012, you probably saw that using file storage for your Hyper-V and SQL Server data is one of our key new scenarios. You can read more about this in the TechNet article called “High-Performance, Continuously Available File Share Storage for Server Applications”...