Tag: Storage

Microsoft News – 27 March 2015

Welcome to the Azure Times! Or so it seems. Lots of Azure developments since I posted one of these news aggregations.

Windows Client

Azure

Office

Office 365

Windows Server Technical Preview – Storage Transient Failure

Nothing will make a Hyper-V admin bald faster than storage issues. Whether it’s ODX on HP 3par or networking issues caused by Emulex, even if the blip is transient, it will crash your VMs. This all changes in vNext.

The next version of Hyper-V is more tolerant of storage issues. A VM will enter a paused state when the hypervisor detects an underlying storage issue. This will protect the VM from an unnecessary stoppage in the case of a transient issue. If the storage goes offline just for a few seconds, then the VM goes into a pause state for a few seconds, and there’s no stoppages, reboots, or database repairs.

Windows Server Technical Preview – Distributed Storage QoS

One of the bedrocks of virtualization or a cloud is the storage that the virtual machines (and services) are placed on. Guaranteeing performance of storage is tricky –some niche storage manufacturers such as Tintrí (Irish for lightning) charge a premium for their products because they handle this via black box intelligent management.

In the Microsoft cloud, we have started to move towards software-defined storage based on the Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) with SMB 3.0 connectivity. This is based on commodity hardware, and with WS2012 R2, we currently have a very basic form of storage performance management. We can set:

  • Maximum IOPS per VHD/X: to cap storage performance
  • Minimum IOPS per VHD/X: not enforced, purely informational

This all changes with vNext where we get distributed storage QoS for SOFS deployments. No, you do not get this new feature with legacy storage system deployments.

A policy manager runs on the SOFS. Here you can set storage rules for:

  • Tenants
  • Virtual machines
  • Virtual hard disks

Using a new protocol, MS-SQOS, the SOFS passes storage rule information back to the relevant hosts. This is where rate limiters will enforce the rules according to the policies, set once, on the SOFS. No matter which host you move the VM to, the same rules apply.

image

The result is that you can:

  • Guarantee performance: Important in a service-centric world
  • Limit damage: Cap those bad boys that want everything to themselves
  • Create a price banding system: Similar to Azure, you can set price bands where there are different storage performance capabilities
  • Offer fairly balanced performance: Every machine gets a fair share of storage bandwidth

At this point, all management is via PowerShell, but we’ll have to wait and see what System Center brings forth for the larger installs.

Microsoft News – 13 March 2015

Quite bit of stuff to read since my last aggregation post on the 3rd.

Windows Server

Hyper-V

Windows Client

Azure

Office 365

Intune

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 3 March 2015

Here’s the latest in the Microsoft world!

Hyper-V

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 26 February 2015

In today’s cloudy link aggregation I have news on Windows Server (2003 end of life to Azure), Private Cloud bugs, Azure, and Office 365.

Windows Server

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Microsoft News – 24 February 2015

Here is the latest news in the world of Microsoft infrastructure:

Hyper-V

Windows Server

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 19 February 2015

Here’s the latest in the Microsoft world. Shame on Lenovo for pre-installing adware that is a man-in-the-middle attack. Crapware must die!

Hyper-V

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Microsoft Partners

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 28 January 2015

Things have quietened down after the Windows 10 and HoloLens news, and Azure is back to dominating this post.

Windows Server

Windows Client

Azure

Intune

Security

Miscellaneous

Windows Server Technical Preview – Distributed Storage QoS

In a modern data centre, there is more and more resource centralization happening. Take a Microsoft cloud deployment for example, such as what Microsoft does with CPS or what you can do with Windows Server (and maybe System Center). A chunk of a rack can contain over a petabyte of RAW storage in the form of a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) and the rest of the rack is either hosts or TOR networking. With this type of storage consolidation, we have a challenge: how do we ensure that each guest service gets the storage IOPS that it requires?

From a service providers perspective:

  • How do we provide storage performance SLAs?
  • How do we price-band storage performance (pay more to get more IOPS)?

Up to now with Hyper-V you required a SAN (such as Tintrí) to do some magic on the backend. WS2012 R2 Hyper-V added a crude storage QoS method (maximum rule only) that was performed on at the host and not at the storage. So:

  • There was no minimum or SLA-type rule, only a cap.
  • QoS rules were not distributed so there was no accounting on host X what Hosts A-W were doing to the shared storage system.

Windows Server vNext is adding Distributed Storage QoS that is the function of a partnership between Hyper-V hosts and a SOFS. Yes: you need a SOFS – but remember that a SOFS can be 2-8 clustered Window Servers that are sharing a SAN via SMB 3.0 (no Storage Spaces in that design).

Note: the hosts use a new protocol called MS-SQOS (based on SMB 3.0 transport) to partner with the SOFS.

image

Distributed Storage QoS is actually driven from the SOFS. There are multiple benefits from this:

  • Centralized monitoring (enabled by default on the SOFS)
  • Centralized policy management
  • Unified view of all storage requirements of all hosts/clusters connecting to this SOFS

Policy (PowerShell – System Center vNext will add management and monitoring support for Storage QoS) is created on the SOFS, based on your monitoring or service plans. An IO Scheduler runs on each SOFS node, and the policy manager data is distributed. The Policy Manager (a HA cluster resource on the SOFS cluster) pushes (MS-SQOS) policy up the Hyper-V hosts where Rate Limiters restrict the IOPS of virtual machines or virtual hard disks.

image

There are two kinds of QoS policy that you can create:

  • Single-Instance: The resources of the rule are distributed or shared between VMs. Maybe a good one for a cluster/service or a tenant, e.g. a tenant gets 500 IOPS that must be shared by all of their VMs
  • Multi-Instance: All VMs/disks get the same rule, e.g. each targeted VM gets a maximum of 500 IOPS. Good for creating VM performance tiers, e.g. bronze, silver, gold with each tier offering different levels of performance for an individual VM

You can create child policies. Maybe you set a maximum for a tenant. Then you create a sub-policy that is assigned to a VM within the limits of the parent policy.

Note that some of this feature comes from the Predictable Data Centers effort by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.

Hyper-V storage PM, Patrick Lang, presented the topic of Distributed Storage QoS at TechEd Europe 2014.