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Microsoft has a new file system designed to increase data integrity, scalability and availability called the Resilient File System (ReFS). This file system has leveraged many of the NTFS file system goodies and expanded them to make it more scalable and prevent corruptions. ReFS was released with Server 2012 and at the moment is designed for use with file shares. It cannot be used as a boot volume at the present time, but this file system seems poised to replace NTFS down the road. ...

Microsoft Storage Spaces feature used to handle data redundancy, scalability and performance. Storage Spaces takes a set of Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) and pairs them together to allow for; either failures of a disk, gaining the performance of multiple spindles, or gaining the space of multiple disks. Traditionally this has all been handled by creating a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) group. Some examples of RAID would be: Striping (RAID 0) Mirroring (RAID 1) Parity (RAID 5 or 6) Storage Spaces create a similar type of RAID Group but then throw a virtual disk on top of them so that multiple types of stripes can be used on the same disks. For example, three physical disks can be put into a storage space. From there, three separate types of VDISKs can be created, Mirrored, Spanned and Parity can then be placed on the same set of disks with no issue. The diagram below shows an example. ...

It has been an exciting year and I wanted to take a second to thank the sponsors of theITHollow.com. Maintaining a blog and putting out new content on a regular basis is a time-consuming activity and also costs money. Luckily, I’ve got some great sponsors and I look forward to working with them again next year. Thank you to: Also a BIG THANK YOU to Erik and Carolyn Schonsett for the awesome graphics on my site. If you’d like to see more of their work, or need graphics of your own, check out: ...

Active Directory (AD) is the base of most enterprise level infrastructures and has been for some time. We have become accustomed to seeing this structure and depending on it. But AD has been a thorn in our side since virtualization has become popular due to the inability to take snapshots. This is no longer the case if your shop is running Windows Server 2012 with Active Directory. With the release of Active Directory 2012, Microsoft has added a new object called the VM GenerationID that allows us to snapshot AD Servers. ...

My brand new shiny HP Microserver arrived in the mail and I was excited to try it out. I had four 480GB OCZ SSDs to add to this baby server and wanted to get it up and running. Unfortunately, the HP Microserver is built for 3.5 inch drives. Luckily I found great solution. Newer Technology AdaptaDrive 2.5" to 3.5" Drive Converter Bracket. Attach your 2.5 inch SSD to this bracket, then attach the bracket to the HP MicroServer Drive Trays and you’re good to go. ...

Cloud Physics generated a lot of buzz during the 2012 VMworld in San Francisco. I remember them sharing a booth with Fusion-IO and having a large crowd most of the time. They had a little different idea about how to get viability into vSphere environments and it was through the concept of cards. The Installation of Cloud Physics may be one of the simplest ever done. 1. Go to the CloudPhysics site and sign up for their service. (There is a 30 day free trial available as well). ...

As many of you know I’ve been a fan of the VMware Product called Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for a disaster recovery solution, I even wrote an SRM 5.5 Guide for using it. But many people I talked to told me to check out Zerto as a DR solution because of how simple it was to use and setup. I figured that I owed it to them to at least try them out, and so they are now in my lab. ...

I was fortunate enough to get to spend an hour with Dmitriy Sandler from Nimble Storage to see what all the fuss was about with their product and more specifically their Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) File System. Hardware Overview Let’s cover some of the basics before we dive into CASL. The storage array comes fully loaded with all the bells and whistles, out of the box. All the software features are included with this iSCSI array and include items such as: ...

Hard drives are not the most fun thing to talk about, but it’s important to know some of the concepts when it comes to disk latency. Disk latency refers to the time delay between a request for data and the return of the data. It sounds like a simple thing, but this time can be critical to the performance of a system. We should be surprised that traditional hard disks work at all when we consider that head designed to read minute magnetic fields sits 3 nanometers off a platter is spinning between 5400RPM and 15,000 RPM. Amazing when you stop to think about it huh? ...

I recently had the opportunity to check out a new product called Maxta. If you’re not familiar with the company yet, that’s ok as it’s just now hitting the market with some vigor. The Generally Available (GA) version of Maxta is a software-centric solution that make the most out of storage all ready available on your servers. Maxta takes local storage on your ESXi hosts and creates a VMware datastore out of it. At first glance it’s hard not to immediately compare it to VMware new VSAN solution that is coming soon. Aside from the fact that Maxta is available right now, there are some other major differences. ...