A blog covering Azure, Hyper-V, Windows Server, desktop, systems management, deployment, and so on …
This presentation was an introduction for IT pros to deploying hybrid cloud solutions based on Microsoft Azure, in conjunction with on-premises Hyper-V / System Center deployments. Here’s the deck that I presented … and yes … there are LOTS of slides because there is constantly new stuff in Azure.
It was a bank (national) holiday weekend here in Ireland. I was also attending and speaking at E2EVC in Brussels, where I talked about designing and building Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 storage – that seemed to go down well to a full room.
Here’s a break down of the news from a slow weekend:
I was doing some work with some SSDs yesterday that had previously had some firmware issues. I wanted to verify that everything was OK, so I popped the disks into the DataOn 1640 JBOD that is in the lab at work. The firmware was upgraded, and the disks were eligible to join a storage pool, but they were not reporting a physical location.
A Storage Spaces certified JBOD (there is a special HCL category) must be able to report disk locations using SCSI Enclosure Services (SES). You can see my problem below; 4 SSDs are not reporting their enclosure or slot locations, but the other disks in the JBOD are just fine.
I contacted the folks in DataOn and had a near instant response. Run the following cmdlet twice:
Update-StorageProviderCache -DiscoveryLevel Full
I did that, refreshed Server Manager and … no change.
Ah … but this isn’t a simple Storage Spaces build. This is a clustered Storage Spaces installation. I jumped over to the other node in my SOFS, the “read-write server”, and ran the cmdlets there. One refresh later and everything was as it should be.
Now all of the disks are reporting both their enclosure and their slots.
Thanks to Rocky in DataOn for his help!
I do a lot of messing around with Storage Spaces. This can involve reusing disks that have been used in other pools – I want to erase the disks but I encounter an error:
Error deleting virtual disk: The storage pool could not complete the operation because its configuration is read-only.
This is easy to fix … with PowerShell. Get the name of the Storage Pool, also known as the friendly name – for example Pool1. Then run:
Get-StoragePool –FriendlyName “Pool1” | Set-StoragePool –IsReadOnly $false
Then if you are sure, you can delete the storage pool, thus cleaning the disks for reuse:
Get-StoragePool –FriendlyName “Pool1” | Remove-StoragePool
1,000,000 IOPS from Hyper-V VMs using a SOFS? Talk about nerd-vana!!! Here are the links I found interesting over the last 48 hours:
Another community event is coming on June 19th and 20th in Citywest in Dublin. This time, with TechCamp 2014, we’re switching to a more “here’s how to do it” style of presentation. Based on feedback, we’ll have 1 track per day, over 2 days. Day 1 (June 19th) will focus on Hybrid Cloud, mixing Windows Server, System Center, and Microsoft Azure content into one track. On day 2 (June 20th) the focus switches over to the public cloud, and products like Office 365 and Windows Intune.
Most of the speakers are MVPs sharing their knowledge and experience with these technologies, with keynotes by local Microsoft product-line managers.
You can choose to register for either or both days.
Please retweet, post on Facebook, LinkedIn, share with workmates, customers, etc.
Another quiet 24 hours ahead of TechEd:
Here’s the news for the last 24 hours. I suspect things will remain quiet until the keynote at TechEd. Even then, I’d expect news to be limited to cloud services.
Between a bank holiday and some travel, I’ve been unable to post, but I’ve saved up the headlines from those days:
Happy May Day, comrades! I was tied up with events the last couple of mornings so here is two days worth of news. Note the new beta for System Center Advisor. The security functionality looks very interesting!