Below you can see the architecture of the setup.\u00a0 Let\u2019s start with the DataOn JBOD.\u00a0 It has dual controllers and dual PSUs.\u00a0 Each controller has some management ports for factory usage (not shown).\u00a0 In a simple non-stacked solution such as below, you\u2019ll use SAS ports 1 and 2 to connect your servers.\u00a0 A SAS daisy chaining port is included to allow you to expand this JBOD to multiple trays.\u00a0 Note that if scaling out the JBOD is on the cards then look at the much bigger models \u2013 this one takes 24 2.5\u201d disks.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know why people still<\/em> think that SOFS disks go into the servers \u2013 THEY GO INTO A SHARED JBOD!!!\u00a0 Storage inside a server cannot be HA; there is no replication or striping of internal disks between servers.\u00a0 In this case we have inserted 8 * 600 GB 10K HDDs (capacity at a budget) and 2 STEC 400 GB SSDs (speed).\u00a0 This will allow us to implement WS2012 R2 Storage Spaces tiered storage and write-back cache.<\/p>\n The Servers<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m recycling the 2 servers that I\u2019ve been using as Hyper-V hosts for the last year and a half.\u00a0 They\u2019re HP DL360 servers.\u00a0 Sadly, HP Proliants are stuck in the year 2009 and I can\u2019t use them to demonstrate and teach new things like SR-IOV.\u00a0 We\u2019re getting in 2 Dell rack servers to take over the role as Hyper-V hosts and the HP servers will become our SOFS nodes.<\/p>\n Both servers had 2 * dual port 10 GbE cards, giving me 4 * 10 GbE ports.\u00a0 One card was full height and the other modified to half height \u2013 occupying both<\/em> ports in the servers.\u00a0 We got LSI controllers to connect the 2 servers to the JBOD.\u00a0 Each LSI adapter is full height and has 2 ports.\u00a0 Thus we needed 4 SAS cables.\u00a0 SOFS Node 1 connects to port 1 on each controller on the back of the JBOD, and SOFS Node 2 connects to port 2 on each controller.\u00a0 The DataOn manual shows you how to attach further JBODs and cable the solution if you need more disk capacity in this SOFS module.<\/p>\n Note that I have added these features:<\/p>\n The Cluster<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The network design is what I\u2019ve talked about before<\/a>.\u00a0 The on-board 1 GbE NICs are teamed for management.\u00a0 The servers now have a single dual port 10 GbE card.\u00a0 These 10 GbE NICs ARE NOT TEAMED \u2013 I\u2019ve put them on different subnets for SMB Multichannel (a cluster requirement).\u00a0 That means they are simple traditional NICs, each with a different IP address.\u00a0 I\u2019ve used NetQOSPolicy to do QoS for those 2 networks on a per-protocol basis.\u00a0 That means that SMB 3.0 and backup and cluster communications go across these two networks.<\/p>\n Hans Vredevoort (Hyper-V MVP colleague) went with a different approach: teaming the 10 GbE NICs and presenting team interfaces that are bound to different VLANs\/subnets.\u00a0 In WS2012, the dynamic teaming mode will use flowlets to truly aggregate data and spread even a single data stream across the team members (physical interfaces).<\/p>\n Storage Spaces<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The storage pool is created in Failover Clustering.\u00a0 While TechEd demos focused on PowerShell, you can create a tiered pool and tiered virtual disks in the GUI.\u00a0 PowerShell is obviously the best approach for standardization and repetitive work (such as consulting).\u00a0 I\u2019ve fired up a single virtual disk so far with a nice chunk of SSD tiering and it\u2019s performing pretty well.<\/p>\n First Impressions<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n I wanted to test quickly before the new Dell hosts come so Hyper-V is enabled on the SOFS cluster.\u00a0 This is a valid deployment scenario, especially for a small\/medium enterprise (SME).\u00a0 What I have built is the equivalent (more actually) of a 2-node Hyper-V cluster with a SAS attached SAN \u2026 albeit with tiered storage \u2026 and that storage was less than half the cost of a SAN from Dell\/HP.\u00a0 In fact, the retail price of the HDDs is around 1\/3 the list price of the HP equivalent.\u00a0 There is no comparison.<\/p>\n I deployed a bunch of VMs with differential disks last night.\u00a0 Nice and quick.\u00a0 Then I pinned the parent VHD to the SSD tier and created a boot storm.\u00a0 Once again, nice and quick.\u00a0 Nothing scientific has been done and I haven\u2019t done comparison tests yet.<\/p>\n But it was all simple to set up and way cheaper than traditional SAN.\u00a0 You can\u2019t beat that!<\/p>\n Yesterday we took delivery of a DataOn DNS-1640D JBOD tray with 8 * 600 GB 10K disks and 2 * 400 GB dual channel SSDs.\u00a0 This is going to be the heart of V2 of the lab at work, providing me with physical scalable and continuously available storage. The JBOD Below you can see the … Continue reading “Getting Started With DataOn JBOD In WS2012 R2 Scale-Out File Server”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[63,180,99,118,120],"class_list":["post-15231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-windows-server","tag-failover-clustering","tag-hardware","tag-storage","tag-windows-server-2012","tag-windows-server-2012-r2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/image4.png\" "\\"image\\"")
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