Great! You just found out about the greatest hidden gem of Windows Server 2016 which is now scheduled for the Windows Server 2019 release. Cluster Sets already have been announced at Microsoft Ignite 2017, and now also in this blog on Windows Server 2019. Cluster Sets Since the introduction of Storage Spaces Direct I’ve […]
VMM – Adding PXE server – Error (21150)
When preparing a System Center 2016 Virtual Machine Manager (4.0.1662.0) environment for bare-metal deployment I walked into the following issue when adding the PXE server. This VMM installation is highly available, in other words: Clustered. Issue Error in VMM: Error (21150) Failed to customize WinPE Image. Recommended Action Verify that Virtual Machine Manager and […]
Storage Spaces Direct – Cache Disk Status
Storage Spaces Direct can make use of cache disks if you have provided SSDs or NVMe SSDs in your nodes. Normally the capacity disks are bound to cache disks round-robin, see the official Microsoft doc here. If you suspect or see that one node is not getting the right performance numbers you might wonder if […]
VMM Logical Network representation
Long long ago, when the year was 2015, I created a VMM Logical Network representation to understand VMM networking better. Never posted it…. but here it is: DOWNLOAD VISIO: Logical Network
Add Network Adapter to SET (Switch Embedded Teaming)
In this short blog I’m going to show how to add a network adapter to a SET switch team. With Windows Server 2016 Microsoft released a new way of teaming called “Switch Embedded Teaming” also known as SET. With SET we have to ability to create a team which is part of the virtual switch. […]
Windows Server 2016 Networking – Part 3- Optimizing Network settings
In the previous parts we’ve configured our network infrastructure with DCB and set QoS policies to ensure traffic bandwidth. But there is more! In this part I’m going to shown known and unknown tips and tricks that optimizes your network infrastructure.
Windows Server 2016 Networking – Part 2 – Configuring DCB in Windows
As shown in the previous part, Data-center Bridging (DCB) has these CoS values (0-7) and based on that the network stack will prioritize traffic and when it becomes too much even pause a specific flow. I also told you that every node in the network in an active DCB node and needs to have DCB […]
Windows Server 2016 Networking – Part 1- RDMA, DCB, PFC, ETS, etc
In this multi-part blog series I’m going to try to clear some fog around the networking parts needed in Windows Server 2016, especially when using Storage Spaces (Direct). I’ll be touching multiple areas, things that were new to me (I’m not a network guy) such as DCB and and PFC, but also recommendations on the […]
Windows Server 2016 Networking – Multiple DCB priorities
When configuring DCB on Windows Server 2016, you can create policies to tag specific traffic with a specific priority to let DCB handle the right QoS. For more info how this works, please see this blog series: http://www.darrylvanderpeijl.com/windows-server-2016-networking-rdma-dcb-pfc-ets-etc/ When you have multiple types of traffic that you want to separate into DCB priorities, e.g. Storage and […]
Storage Spaces Direct Needs Rebalance
When you write or delete a lot of data in your storage pool it could be that your volumes end up with the operational status of “Needs Rebalance” This operation needs to be executed by the Administrator (Yes, i’m pointing at you right now) when your disks need a rebalance. You can use the following […]