Veeam webinar 19/3: Automate daunting virtualization tasks with SMA

On wednesday the 19th of March I will together with Veeam have a web seminar with the topic:

Screen Shot 2014-03-05 at 21.54.12

Automate daunting virtualization tasks  with SMA

Now that you have set up your virtualization environment, you’ll want to automate it. In this webinar, you will learn how to do this with Service Management Automation(SMA) and how to integrate automated tasks into the Hyper-V virtualization environment. You will use different runbooks to automate some boring but necessary tasks that IT admins have to do.

This webinar will show you how to:

  • Automate patching of virtualization hosts
  • Expand virtual hard disks based on usage
  • Automatically update integrational components on VMs
  • Automatically update virtual hard disk templates
  • Clean old snapshots that have been forgotten
  • And more…

If you want to register and be part of this crazy one hour with the Swedish Chef you can do it on the following link

And guess what, It comes in a swedish version also! Check out in the following link and if you understand Swedish, register here!

Windows Server 2012 R2 SOFS with tiering require some disks..

I was at a meeting last friday and they where in the process of deploying a Scale Out File Server environment on Windows Server 2012 R2 and that with a Dell jbod box.

MD1220_2

One important thing to consider when designing this is that if you want to use all the features in the new 2012 R2 with storage spaces there are some limits that could imply and affect your design.

If you want the new cool performance intelligent storage tiering in 2012 R2 that can only be used with either simple or mirroring protection on the physical level which result in quite an overhead on disks in your jbods to get some TB for the actual data. If only the deduplication feature would have been supported with server workloads and not just VDI setups, then this would not have been such a big deal.

Screen Shot 2014-03-02 at 08.52.51

Setting up your environment based on this would require some planning and creating several different storage selections where not everything stored on your superperformance auto-tiering parts of your SOFS. Maybe your budget would allow you to fill the JBOD with only SSD´s and then this is no problem 🙂 but if not you should at least consider creating several different shares where the virtual disks either have storage tiering with mirroring or a plain disk with parity.

I would love to see some development in the SOFS storage integrated with Hyper-V in the same manner that VMware has with their Storage-DRS that could, based on different workloads and their load on different VHDX, be moved between the different datastores not just the tiers. This could be even more refined when adding a StorSimple box and the data that has not been accessed for a while would be offloaded to Azure.

stokage-cloud-StorSimple-Microsoft

Yes I know the StorSimple hardware needs a refresh in their NIC connectivity (in the current boxes there is a 2*1 Gbit active) but hopefully we will see some new hardware in a not to far future. And in an solution where the StorSimple box would be used and connected in a SOFS cluster together with JBOD´s the network bandwidth would not have such a large impact.