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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...

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...

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...

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 Windows Server 2012 includes a new feature called SMB Multichannel, part of the SMB 3.0 protocol, which increases the network performance and availability for File Servers.   1.1. Benefits SMB Multichannel allows file servers to use multiple network connections simultaneously and...

1. Overview 1.1. Introduction Windows Server 2012 provides Windows PowerShell cmdlets and WMI objects to manage SMB File Servers and SMB File Shares. These new tools are aimed at both System Administrator and Developers. 1.2. Benefits SMB PowerShell cmdlets allow an IT Administrator...

SMB Signing Overview Server Message Block (SMB) is the file protocol most commonly used by Windows. SMB Signing is a feature through which communications using SMB can be digitally signed at the packet level. Digitally signing the packets enables the recipient of the packets to confirm their point...

Last week I was testing Visual Studio 2010 to write a C# application to export all my blog posts to a file. I described that in some detail at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2010/03/21/experimenting-with-visual-studio-2010-and-backing-up-the-entries-on-my-blog.aspx I am performing the exact...

As I continue to experiment with PowerShell v2 in Windows Server 2008 R2, I will share some of what I learn here on the blog. This time I am focusing on PowerShell Remoting. If you never played with PowerShell before, please start by reading http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/07/25/experimenting...

As I continue to experiment with PowerShell v2 in Windows Server 2008 R2, I will share some of what I learn here on the blog. This time I am focusing on Cmdlets, Snap-ins and Modules. Cmdlets Windows PowerShell introduced the notion of a “cmdlet” (you pronounce it “commandlet”). These are like...

Powershell is a command line interface for Windows that offers a very powerful and flexible model. It is now a feature included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, not an optional download as before. In this post, I show some sample commands that can help you understand some of the basic features...

Overview In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of the Distributed File System (DFS) in Windows Server 2008, which offers users simplified access to a set of file shares and helps administrators easily maintain the file server infrastructure behind those file shares, including options for load...

Overview FSRM (File Server Resource Manager) is a service of the File Services role in Windows Server 2008. You can use FSRM to enhance your ability to manage and monitor storage activities on your file server. The main capabilities of FSRM include: Folder Quotas File Screening Storage...

1 – What is Storage Explorer Storage Explorer is a new tool in Windows Server 2008 to help you understand how your server SAN storage is configured. It provides information about the storage fabrics (Fibre Channel and iSCSI) and also about the configuration of each server. This new tool can...

What is SIS Single Instance Storage (SIS) is a feature of Windows Storage Server (WSS) 2003 R2 and Windows Unified Storage Server (WUDSS) 2003 that helps save disk space by de-duplicating files. If you have two or more identical files in a volume, SIS will store a single copy of those bits, replacing...

Back in Windows 2000 Server days, managing SAN-based storage in Windows was mostly up to your SAN vendor. You would typically need to load a tool to manage your storage device (either graphical or command-line) or sometimes use a web-based application. If you had multiple storage arrays, you would likely...

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...