Azure Stack HCI is a hyper-converged Windows Server 2019 cluster that uses validated hardware to run virtualized workloads on-premises. Set the Interface Metric for Mgmt and S2D NICs ( Run on Both Nodes ). Azure Stack Hub uses Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) with Windows Server Failover Clustering. Make use of completely orchestrated Disaster Recovery to an other site or Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery. AKS on Azure Stack HCI significantly simplifies the experience to deploy a Kubernetes host and cluster on-premises. This was connected to the 1GB network on the vessel which the servers management NICs connected to as well. S2D builds on Failover Cluster so combining it with Windows Admin Center makes an enterprise HCI cluster with a built-in hypervisor Hyper-V and a centralized web management tool Windows Admin Center. Figure 1 – Azure Stack HCI S2D Chelsio iWARP RDMA Solution for Azure Stack HCI iWARP has been an IETF standard (RFC 5040) since 2008, TCP/IP has been an IETF standard (RFC 793, 791) since 1982. iWARP inherits the loss resilience and congestion management from underlying TCP/IP stack and enables a very high performance, extremely low latency, high I am not saying it is the best, well it could be, but that depends on your workloads, requirements, budget, desired outcome, constraints, and so on … I am a big fan of Microsoft S2D because first its hardware independent and second most customers already pay for Microsoft Datacenter licenses anyway so why not take full benefit of the offered products within. This SR650 model is used throughout this document as an example for S2D deployment tasks. Azure Stack HCI (S2D) Pre-Flight Check-Up: $495.00 Some of those partners provide hardware for both. Ah, to clarify I have 4 hosts, each host has 1x M.2 and 4x SATA. With just a four node Azure Stack HCI cluster with R640 S2D Ready Nodes configure all NVMe drives and 100Gb Ethernet, we observed: 2.95M IOPS with an average read latency of 242μs in a VM Fleet test configured for 4K block size and 100% reads; 0.8M IOPS with an average write latency of 4121 μs in a VM Fleet test configured for 4K block size and 100% writes ; Up to 63GB/s of 100% … Sessions: 1. Most HCI companies out there require one of these as their SDS solution. For so long I have ran S2D in my lab on an unsupported configuration and most of the time I got very bard performance so this time I was very pleased to see this screen. Achieve industry-leading virtual machine performance with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct technology with built-in support for non-volatile memory express (NVMe), persistent memory, and remote direct memory access (RDMA) networking. Microsoft S2D is hardware sensitive, specifically on the storage HBA, Network Card, and Disks so those are areas that cannot be compromised in. The storage controller needs to be a SAS passthrough HBA not RAID HBA, this is very critical, JBOD or RAID0 is not supported and will give very bad performance so make sure the HBA is SAS pass through. No gateway or DNS. 5 Major Software Defined Storage vendors (sds definition). Azure Stack vs Azure Stack HCI. Would you recommend separating the physical nodes of the S2D into different locations or keeping them together? Hi great article, my Windows hosts have 1TB M.2 drive for OS and a number of SATA for the storage pool. If you want to know more why the Azure Stack HCI solutions are the right choice for you, check out the official Azure Stack HCI page or check out the Azure Stack HCI documentation page. Aside from the ‘”rigid” requirement, the customer workloads were very standard so a single host can suffice yet for HA we needed a second server. Azure Stack vs Azure Stack HCI. Upgrade to VMware vCenter 7, vSphere 7, and vSAN 7, Remote Work: Its all about the browser ! For this configuration, it was direct connected so no switches in between hence no DCB but even with a bigger cluster or switch connected nodes, I always recommend iWARP especially on Chelsio since it does not require any switch or server additional network configuration. Merge existing server and storage workloads and reduce data-center footprint. Azure Stack HCI Catalog. But opting out of some of these cookies may influence your browsing experience. One disk on every node was labeled as hot spare since these are remote vessels and we needed an extra layer of fault tolerance for any disk cluster failure. Azure Stack HCI includes Lifecycle Management with cluster aware updates to keep your data safe while making the update process simple, safe and minimize disruptions in your hybrid datacenter. Some of you might got confused with the news Microsoft released Azure Stack HCI. Get-PhysicalDisk 1006 | Set-PhysicalDisk -Usage HotSpare, Get-PhysicalDisk 2006 | Set-PhysicalDisk -Usage HotSpare. So in our case, S2D1 NIC on Server-1 is connected to S2D1 NIC on Server-2 and both tagged with VLAN 35 having an IP from the range 10.20.35.X/24 . You probably never heard of Microsoft S2D for couple of reasons, most of which is that Microsoft does not target marketing and selling this product independently nor do partners for that matter. As other rack servers, such as the SR630, are added to the ThinkAgile MX Certified Node family, the steps required to deploy S2D on them will be identical to those contained in this document. Microsoft just announced the new Azure Stack HCI, delivered as an Azure hybrid service, at Microsoft Inspire 2020. Also make sure that all server hardware vendor drivers and BIOS are updated to the latest, this is done from the Lifecycle console on Dell EMC servers so update everything to the latest and make sure drivers are correctly installed on the hosts. Remember that S2D in Server 2019 is a datacenter feature so make sure that your licenses are in order. Related: Branded Hybrid Clouds Redraw Data Center Boundaries. These server ready-nodes make for a superior and reliable Azure Stack HCI scale-out server solution for file services, media streaming, video surveillance, IoT data gathering, backup and archive, and big data analytics. As other rack servers, such as the SR630, are added to the ThinkAgile MX Certified Node family, the steps required to deploy S2D on them will be identical to those contained in this document. Azure Stack deployments can maximize storage performance, or balance performance and capacity. S2D will still require a quorum but unlike other vendors such as VMware vSAN and Nutanix, the quorum can be hosted on an external file share as of Server 2019 which essentially means if your router supported CIFS shares you can use that as your quorum while with other solutions you need to procure a third server which must be rigid as well so its price is quite high and technically not needed to run resources. BlackBerry Desktop, Digital Workplace, CylanceProtect, & Awingu, Install BlackBerry Workspaces in VDI : Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, Frame, and Awingu. The best move Microsoft made not only for S2D but for servers and clusters is the Microsoft Windows Admin Center (Free) which allows any administrator to configure, operate, and monitor S2D clusters in a very simple and efficient manner without having to resort to PowerShell or even SCVMM for that matter. Overview While spending a lot of time on the Storage Spaces Direct Slack group, one thing that comes up, again and again, is patching of S2D Clusters, and what is the best way to do it. 4GB of RAM is required for every TB of cache disk. Azure Stack HCI / Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Performance test with DiskSpd *** Disclaimer *** s2d.dk is not responsible for any errors, or for the results obtained from the use of this information on s2d.dk. Required fields are marked *. Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -Name S2D1 -RegistryKeyword “*jumbopacket” | Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -RegistryValue 9014, Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -Name S2D2 -RegistryKeyword “*jumbopacket” | Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -RegistryValue 9014. Deploying Kubernetes on premises is complex. Azure Stack HCI OS Stretched Clustering One of the great new features in Azure Stack HCI OS is stretched clustering support for Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). In this blog post I will describe the differences and how to position both platforms. Use Azure … You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. In March of 2019, Microsoft announced Azure Stack HCI, an on-premise implementation of their Azure cloud service. Enable NUMA Node Assignment on S2D 10GB NICs ( Run on Both Nodes ). Configure Microsoft S2D on Dell EMC XR2 2-Node HCI Storage Spaces Direct Server 2019, Deploy Microsoft S2D on Dell EMC XR2 2-Node HCI Storage Spaces Direct Server 2019, Install Microsoft S2D on Dell EMC XR2 2-Node HCI Storage Spaces Direct Server 2019, IPSec VPN MikroTik to Microsoft Azure Ping Access Issue. Although under-rated in the HCI world, Microsoft S2D has gained significant grounds both independently as an HCI solution and as an Azure Stack hybrid cloud offering. Who knows. Receive an Email Notification When a New Post is Published. S2D is an in-kernel feature of Microsoft Server so needless to say that as an HCI product it only works with Microsoft Hyper-V… Conceptually, if you procure any hardware vendor server and make sure all of the components are S2D certified, you would have an S2D ready node with only losing the single line of support which means you call the hardware vendor support for any hardware issue and call Microsoft for any software issue. Azure Stack HCI. Disk wise we went with 6 x 480GB read-intensive SSD disks per node, the bare minimum is four since this is an all-flash SSD cluster and caching was not required since we don’t have write-intensive applications. 9 Dell EMC Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Networking Guide 3 Topology S2D clusters are limited to 16 nodes. A preconfigured spare EDS14 was provided in the vessel as well to be connected incase the quorum failed for any reason in the open sea. Create Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) on management/VMs 1GB NICs ( Run on Both Nodes ). Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Solution. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. I can’t say I had come across S2D and it does seem like it ticks a lot of boxes for a cost effective “DiY” HCI – not least because at least some customers I’ve spoken to are licensing for Server Datacenter simply due to the Windows guests they are running (irrespective of hypervisor). Enables cloud capabilities into your data center for companies that want to build and run cloud applications on their own hardware. Then again, it was included back with Windows Server 2019 Enterprise Edition. There are many ways one can go about setting up the networking for an Azure Stack HCI (ASHCI)/Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) cluster. The number of nodes in a cluster and the applied fault tolerance supported such as mirroring for 2-nodes or parity for 4-nodes and the resultant usable resources accordingly. Partners need to open up different options for their customers in an effort to embrace the right technology for the right requirement and customers need to practice their due diligence when assessing available HCI products in the market. Also, there is no way to convert this Microsoft HCI product into an Azure Stack deployment. We tested the following configurations: QLC SSD Config – 4x Intel ® D5-P4326 NVMe 15TB QLC SSDs (storage) with 2x Intel P4610 NVMe 1.6TB SSDs (cache) per node The storage provided by S2D can have different resilience and performance characteristics. Basically the network needs to be minimum 10GB and recommended is 25GB with RDMA either RoCE or iWARP (the second being my choice given RDMA will work without specific server or switch configuration). When an Azure Stack Hub … Although Azure Stack HCI is based on the same core operating system components as Windows Server, it's an entirely new product line focused on being the best virtualization host. Azure Stack HCI is a better solution to run virtualized workloads in a familiar way – but with Hyperconverged efficiency – and connect to Azure for hybrid scenarios such as cloud backup, cloud-based monitoring, etc. on Server-1 renamed the 10GB NICs and assigned an IP from different subnet for each and on Server-2 did the exact same thing, always better to specify the same names for the NICs and makes sure that the interconnected NICs between servers have IPs on the same subnet. S2D is used to create a hyperconverged infrastructure where storage is shared among, and can be accessed from all … Convenience Preconfigured Ready Nodes make adoption very convenient. Deploying Kubernetes on-premises is complex. Although under-rated in the HCI world, Microsoft S2D has gained significant grounds both independently as an HCI solution and as an Azure Stack hybrid cloud offering. For example in an All-Flash configuration a minimum of 4 disks per server/node is required. Azure Arc can manage that infrastructure. Even with the simplicity presented in Azure Stack HCI, your HCI infrastructure is still backed by our leading solution level ProSupport, to give you the confidence to create confidently. Out of these cookies, it stores the cookies that are categorized as necessary on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. Related: The Real Value of Azure Stack Both Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI are built on top of server systems from a range of partners. DataON S2D-5230 server nodes are ultra-dense and feature cost-efficient, large internal storage capacity in a space saving design. WSSD HCI is like Azure Stack HCI with a foundation of vendor-specific hardware, including Windows Server technologies — Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct and software-defined networking — and Windows Admin Center for systems management. Also note that the required supported server hardware is not sold or marketed by Microsoft so no benefit for them in that area, they only sell software when it comes to HCI. This SR650 model is used throughout this document as an example for S2D deployment tasks. Software Defined Networking (20 mins.) Make sure to also change the Live Migration Settings by right clicking networks in Failover Cluster Manager and select only the S2D NICs. Some of you might got confused with the news Microsoft released Azure Stack HCI. Storage Spaces started as a technology that offered software RAID for servers and desktops running Windows 10 and then evolved into Storage Spaces Direct on Server 2016 then 2019 Datacenter as part of Microsoft Azure Stack offering given that Azure Stack is built on Microsoft S2D Software Defined Storage. This new Microsoft HCI offering is a hyper-converged infrastructure product that combines vendor-specific hardware with Windows Server 2019 Datacenter edition and management tools to provide a highly integrated and optimized computing platform for local VM workloads. Set-NetAdapterRSS S2D1 -BaseProcessorNumber 2 -MaxProcessors 2 -MaxProcessorNumber 4, Set-NetAdapterRSS S2D2 -BaseProcessorNumber 6 -MaxProcessors 2 -MaxProcessorNumber 8. Would be cool to get any feedback. Although trivial compared to other projects, this was the very first time I was able to sell two different HCI solutions to the same customer serving different requirements and I couldn’t feel more proud to be honest. Last year, the Windows Server Software Defined (WSSD) program was already renamed to Azure Stack HCI in conjunction with Windows Server 2019. Introducing Azure Arc. I also tried to do “Nested Mirroring” for two nodes, have you tried that? Configure a Share on Synology NAS or any device and add the share as Cluster Quorum ( Run on One Node ). Microsoft Azure Stack HCI Solution. Consulting Services. Buy Azure Stack HCI from your preferred hardware partner. In addition, we recommend that servers, drives, host bus adapters, and network adapters have the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Standard and/or Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Premium additional qualifications (AQs), as pictured below. The disks must be enterprise SSD disks not consumer SSD disks, I will discuss the required space and endurance later but make sure that SSDs are enterprise. New-Cluster -Name S2D-Cluster -Node S2D-01,S2D-02 -NoStorage -StaticAddress 10.20.34.16. The video is uncut and unedited so bare with me on this one as we figure out how to replace the HBAs. Don’t be surprised to hear that Microsoft S2D is being used in more than 10,000 clusters worldwide which would account to hundreds of thousands of VM workloads. S2D Ready Nodes are pre-built from the manufacturer with components that are supported by Microsoft and offer a single line of support for the same which is in our case Dell EMC, aside from that it is no different from any other server offering. Networking and SDN coexisting side-by-side. Azure Stack HCI leverages three key fundamental technologies and this presentation will give the essential details on compute, storage and networking as used in Azure Stack HCI. Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias “vEthernet (Mgmt)” -InterfaceMetric 1, Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias “S2D1” -InterfaceMetric 2, Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias “S2D2” -InterfaceMetric 2.