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Storage Replica - Are you trying it out?

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With the release of the Technical Preview, we included a new feature called Storage Replica. We now are including in-box replication that you can setup and utilize. The below blog talks a bit about it and includes a downloadable guide that gives scenarios and instruction for configuring it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2014/10/07/storage-replica-guide-released-for-windows-server-technical-preview.aspx

We would like to know if you have tested it and how things went. Please share your thoughts and tribulations here to help making this a rock solid feature.

Thanks, John Marlin Microsoft Server Beta Team
- Changed type Shaon ShanModerator Monday, November 10, 2014 8:40 AM information sharing
Friday, October 10, 2014 7:51 PM

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With the release of the Technical Preview, we included a new feature called Storage Replica. We now are including in-box replication that you can setup and utilize. The below blog talks a bit about it and includes a downloadable guide that gives scenarios and instruction for configuring it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2014/10/07/storage-replica-guide-released-for-windows-server-technical-preview.aspx

We would like to know if you have tested it and how things went. Please share your thoughts and tribulations here to help making this a rock solid feature.

I'll be publishing set of blog posts with a different scenarios tested but here are some preliminary results:

1) Failover file server. Works but failover is not transparent (YES, CA option is ticked, client does SMB 3.0 as well as it's the same Technical Preview VM). So copy operation gets aborted on failover, something SHOULD NOT happen. I realize lab is virtualized, performance with Preview is sluggish and default timeout of 60 seconds was not tuned so probably that should go away with a release. But be aware of that fact :)

2) Scale-Out File Server. Performance kinda sucks even on bare metal config with 10 gig NICs and flash used for log but... Hosted VM continues to run and perform extensive I/O on SoFS nodes failover. GOOD JOB!!! :)

3) Hyper-V. Failover for HA VM works the same way it would work with a shared storage. EXCELLENT!

So next week I'll add also guest VM cluster test for 3) config and post everything in a step-by-step guides with a screenshots, pictures (cats? dogs? girls? all of them?) and so on. Should I post links here as well?

Anton

P.S. One thing I'm missing now in Hyper-V is a true fault tolerance... VMware and Xen have it for years, KVM is nearly there so Hyper-V is the only hypervisor now who requires ppl to use apps built-in clustering features (SQL Server & AlwaysOn f.e.) and clumsy stuff like guest VM cluster with emulated SAS thru shared VHDX instead of just allowing checkbox checked and having VM running on a multiple nodes with a transparent failover. Storage agnostic synchronous replication is a very important step in a proper direction so adding speculative execution and some buffered network I/O will bring us right where we want to be :) Just my $0.02 :)
StarWind VSAN [Virtual SAN] clusters Hyper-V without SAS, Fibre Channel, SMB 3.0 or iSCSI, uses Ethernet to mirror internally mounted SATA disks between hosts.

Saturday, October 11, 2014 7:57 AM
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Hi John,

Thanks for your sharing! This is the exciting information, it offed the more perfect of high ability!!

Best Regards.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2014 7:07 AM
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With the release of the Technical Preview, we included a new feature called Storage Replica. We now are including in-box replication that you can setup and utilize. The below blog talks a bit about it and includes a downloadable guide that gives scenarios and instruction for configuring it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2014/10/07/storage-replica-guide-released-for-windows-server-technical-preview.aspx

We would like to know if you have tested it and how things went. Please share your thoughts and tribulations here to help making this a rock solid feature.
[ ... ]

OK, so here's the first one...

Storage Replica: General-Purpose Failover File Server with NO SHARED STORAGE

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/b20fb97c-bf41-44ee-9953-f7194742dc1f/storage-replica-generalpurpose-failover-file-server-with-no-shared-storage?forum=WinServerPreview

Hope this helped :)

Anton

StarWind VSAN [Virtual SAN] clusters Hyper-V without SAS, Fibre Channel, SMB 3.0 or iSCSI, uses Ethernet to mirror internally mounted SATA disks between hosts.

Thursday, October 16, 2014 11:42 AM
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Update :) Now we have working 2-node Scale-Out File Server setup (no shared storage!!), failover from SoFS Node1 -> Node2 happens transparently, running VM continues to work on failover (nothing happens). See:

Storage Replica: Scale-Out File Server with NO SHARED STORAGE!!

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/8335372e-5fc2-46fe-a0d9-0a89783771d5/storage-replica-scaleout-file-server-with-no-shared-storage?forum=WinServerPreview

Next we'll try to put more load on VM to see would it notice anything if under stress test.

Also Hyper-V 2-node cluster and (HA VM) and Guest VM cluster setups are coming :)

Thanks!

Anton
StarWind VSAN [Virtual SAN] clusters Hyper-V without SAS, Fibre Channel, SMB 3.0 or iSCSI, uses Ethernet to mirror internally mounted SATA disks between hosts.

Friday, October 17, 2014 12:34 PM
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I haven't tried it because

it only seems to work with iSCSI/SAS/... disks and not ordinary DAS SATA disks.
setup is a bit cumbersome, complicated and buggy in this first release

But anyway, it's the most exciting new feature of Win10 so far! Very interesting direction! I'm hoping for truly software-defined storage in the future without a SPOF, unlike most of the current expensive, inflexible shared storage solutions.

Cheers,
Simon
Friday, October 24, 2014 10:44 PM
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I haven't tried it because

it only seems to work with iSCSI/SAS/... disks and not ordinary DAS SATA disks.
setup is a bit cumbersome, complicated and buggy in this first release

But anyway, it's the most exciting new feature of Win10 so far! Very interesting direction! I'm hoping for truly software-defined storage in the future without a SPOF, unlike most of the current expensive, inflexible shared storage solutions.

1) It will support everything including SATA.

2) It's very easy to setup (actually) and it's not released yet :)

We just did another major step, a Shared Nothing Hyper-V Cluster, 2-node setup, HA VM, everything works as expected. See:

Storage Replica: Hyper-V Cluster, no shared storage, HA VM

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/c66cb88d-97bf-4f23-86dd-8ff0fc061f82/storage-replica-hyperv-cluster-with-a-vm-ha-failover?forum=WinServerPreview

Good luck :)
StarWind VSAN [Virtual SAN] clusters Hyper-V without SAS, Fibre Channel, SMB 3.0 or iSCSI, uses Ethernet to mirror internally mounted SATA disks between hosts.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014 2:42 PM
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With the release of the Technical Preview, we included a new feature called Storage Replica. We now are including in-box replication that you can setup and utilize. The below blog talks a bit about it and includes a downloadable guide that gives scenarios and instruction for configuring it.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2014/10/07/storage-replica-guide-released-for-windows-server-technical-preview.aspx

We would like to know if you have tested it and how things went. Please share your thoughts and tribulations here to help making this a rock solid feature.

OK, so probably final 4th scenario:

2 node Hyper-V Cluster, Guest VM Cluster, shared VHDX, no shared storage (Storage Replica used), NO GO :((

Storage Replica: Hyper-V Cluster, Guest VM Cluster, 2 nodes, no shared storage, NO GO :((

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/9fb8a343-eaae-4f87-827c-7aed1e0ea801/storage-replica-hyperv-cluster-with-a-guest-vm-cluster-shared-vhdx-2-nodes-no-shared-storage?forum=WinServerPreview

More feedback (and some new builds?) from MSFT required @ this point :)

Thanks!

Anton

StarWind VSAN [Virtual SAN] clusters Hyper-V without SAS, Fibre Channel, SMB 3.0 or iSCSI, uses Ethernet to mirror internally mounted SATA disks between hosts.
Friday, October 31, 2014 12:26 PM