Browse by Tags

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...

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...

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...

We had a great time showing Windows Server 2012 at TechEd North America and I wanted to share that the recording for our team’s sessions are now publicly available. That includes our sessions on SMB 3.0 and a number of demos, many of them using one of the Cluster-in-box configurations we were...

Robert Smith (Platforms Field Engineer) has recently posted a new blog that cover one important area of Windows performance that few people understand well. In his blog post he talks about how to use Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) in general and the XPerf tool in particular. Xperf.exe is the command...

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) hosted the 8th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) earlier this year. As usual, Microsoft was the underwriter of the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 PlugFest, which was co-located with the SDC event. ...

Last month at the //Build/ conference we had a large number of presentations delivered and made available to download and stream. Several Microsoft Partners and Developers that are focused on Storage, Networking or Hyper-V have asked me for a list of links to help them find the Widows Server 8 sessions...

Introduction For the last few years, I’ve been blogging about the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target and its many uses related to Windows Server Failover Clustering, Hyper-V and other server scenarios. Today, Microsoft has made this software publicly available to all users of Windows Server 2008...

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...

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...

There's a new 77-page white paper covering the use of Folder Redirection and Offline Files in a very practical way. Here's an excerpt: "The objective of this white paper is to show through a case study how to use different Microsoft products and technologies to put in place a comprehensive solution...

Here are some notes on “SQL Server 2008 Database Compression” 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...

Here are some notes on "SQL Server 2008 Statistics" I took while attending an advanced class on SQL Server taught by Kimberly Tripp ( http://sqlskills.com/AboutKimberlyLTripp.asp ). Please note that, although these notes were taken during the class, I might have added some of my own (mis)interpretation...

Here are some additional notes on "SQL Server 2008 Indexing Best Practices" I took while attending an advanced class on SQL Server taught by Kimberly Tripp ( http://sqlskills.com/AboutKimberlyLTripp.asp ). Please note that, although these notes were taken during the class, I might have added some...

While attending training today, I learned some file-related optimizations for SQL Server 2008. Some of those will also apply to previous versions of SQL Server. 1) No performance gain in multiple log files There is a common misconception that having multiple log files per database would help performance...

Overview A recent presentation during SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference described an upcoming tool called “FSCT”. “FSCT” (which stands for “File Server Capacity Tool”) was created by Microsoft after analyzing the workload of production file servers used to store user’s home folders. The tool can...

Next week I will be delivering a presentation on “A CIFS/SMB/SMBV2 File Server Tool for Capacity Planning and Performance Troubleshooting” during SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. You can see the agenda and some additional details in the public event agenda at http://www.snia.org...

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...

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, you can expose storage to a Hyper-V guest in many different ways. After getting some feedback to that initial post, there are two frequent comments that I wanted to address. You can boot a Hyper-V guest from an iSCSI LUN I wanted to highlight that you...

In Windows Server 2003 (RTM, SP1, R2, SP2) and Windows Server 2008, you might run into an issue while trying to install a new VDS Hardware Provider. If you simply install the new VDS provider and immediately run DISKRAID.EXE, you will get the message telling you that: “DiskRAID was unable to find...

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 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...

This post is OBSOLETE. Please check the updated post at: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/01/07/installing-the-evaluation-version-of-wudss-2003-refresh-and-the-microsoft-iscsi-software-target-version-3-1-on-a-vm.aspx --- Overview These are step-by-step instructions on how...

Back in 2001, I worked for a 300-employee company in Palo Alto as their Systems Engineer and one of the things that gave me the most headaches was backups. We had Windows Server across the board, but the backup application was from a third party, which required specific agents for SQL Server, Oracle...