I never really do opinion posts, but when I started writing this.. text just kept coming.. enjoy 🙂 So the word is officially out. Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) is going to be rebranded to Azure Stack HCI for Windows Server 2019. When I first heard about it I was, probably just like you, surprised and […]
Align VMs with Storage
With Storage Spaces Direct, every Metadata / write IO is redirected to the node who owns the Cluster Shared Volume. If you’re using NTFS the volume will be in “Block Redirected Mode”, if ReFS is used the volume will be in “File System Redirected Mode”. You can see this with Powershell; Get-ClusterSharedVolumeState. More info on […]
Two-way mirror vs Nested resiliency
In this blogpost I’m testing out the new resiliency method which we can use with 2-node clusters in Windows Server 2019. This blog is not meant as performance showcase for the hardware but to show the differences between a regular Two-way mirror and nested resiliency volume. Why do I want nested resiliency? Nested resiliency helps […]
Storage Spaces Direct in Azure – Performance
Starting this blog with questions: How do you deploy a highly available fileserver in Azure? Do you count on the SLA (99.9%) of Azure when using premium storage, so doing a single fileserver? How does it perform? In this post I’m diving in on Storage Spaces Direct in Azure, giving a few guidelines but also […]
Kill TCP connection with Powershell
Sometimes you have an application that keeps connections open while they should be closed. Because Windows does not seem to have the capability to kill an connection without killing the whole process we’ll to use a 3rd party tool called cports.exe. Download here:Â https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports-x64.zip $ProcessName= "BackgroundTransferHost" $State = "CloseWait " while ($true) { sleep -Seconds […]
Windows Server Summit – S2D recap
Yesterday (26th of June, 2018) Microsoft held the Windows Server Summit which was mainly focused, not a surprise, on Windows Server. I think this is a great thing, exposure of Windows Server and all the cool capabilities we got since the 2016 release, which IMHO are underexposed and buried under the Azure marketing. Although many […]
Mscorsvw.exe and Ngen.exe high CPU usage
I could not stand that my laptop was blowing all day like a hairdryer and had to search for a fix. High CPU Taskmanager was showing that The .NET Framework optimization service and mscorsvw.exe areusing moderate CPU, but enough to let me fans blow fast. After some searching I came across https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2013/08/06/wondering-why-mscorsvw-exe-has-high-cpu-usage-you-can-speed-it-up/ and https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/davidnotario/2005/04/27/what-is-mscorsvw-exe-and-why-is-it-eating-up-my-cpu-what-is-this-new-clr-optimization-service/ Basically […]
Cluster Sets in Windows Server 2019
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 […]