Storage Spaces Direct - Microsoft Windows Server 2016

A new great storage Feature in Windows Server 2016 is Storage Spaces Direct. Also known as Shared Nothing Scale out File Server.

The video from Ignite 2015 is here

Here are the features and requirements:

It can be deployed on Hyper-V  Server as "Private Cloud Hyper-Converged" installations
for small to medium size environment

Technical Preview 2 not yet  7:50 in video
update: Storage Spaces Direct works great in TP2
update 2: Storage Spaces Direct is much faster in TP3


It can be deployed in traditional way " Privat Cloud Storage"
Typically larger scale out deployments

• File System will be ReFS as primary file system
• Up to 240 Disks per Pool
• RDMA interconnect for low latency and low CPU usage
• Rebalancing for capacity (add node or remove node)
• Technical Preview 2 -- min. 4 Server - max 12 server - max of 240 disk in a pool

Required Hardware from DELL : R730xd (4 of them / LSI 9207-8i (Perc is not running at the moment)

Storage Spaces Data Placement:

Virtual disk consists of Extents (1GB)

Hyper-V Windows Server 2016 technical preview 2 from IGNITE 2015

New features in Hyper-V Windows Server 2016, not all Features are communicated until final release.

• Hyper-V is available on Nano Server 
• virtual TPM Security 
• Secure Boot for Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 / SUSE LES 12)
• Shielded VMs (encrypted by Bitlocker,etc) 
• SoFS can now QoS IO by owner of the VMs - Important for Tenants
•  Storage Resiliency with Resilience File Handle from SoFS. After 60 sec the VM is paused not crashed. After the network connectivity is restored the VM will restart running.
• Cluster Resiliency Feature: After a clusternode was removed from the cluster majority all VMs were turned off on this node. This was fixed by Isolation Mode for the VMs and clusternode, after the network came back the isolation mode exits and all VMs stay online.
• hotadd/ remove Memory static or dynamic configuration
• hotadd/ remove network adapter
• Upgrade from Windows Server 2012 R2 Cluster to Windows Server 2016 without downtime, with rollback function
•  support for production checkpoints, VSS Snapshot for SQL,Exchange during taking checkpoint. After restore of checkpoint the VM , the VM starts with a clean boot. The application and OS interpret this as a normal restore.
• PowerShell from host OS to guest OS
• ReFS for VHDX Operations 
• ReFS instance disk merge for checkpoints with zero data copy- this is really great
• ReFS instance fix disk creation

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