Session: DCIM-B349. Software defined storage with Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. This was a jam packed session with tons of content on each slide. Great in-depth talk about what’s new in the 2012 R2 wave which came out last year. I only captured 25% of the slide content below, so be sure to check out the Channel 9 video and slide deck when they get posed, for all the goodies.
Storage Enhancements
- New approach to storage: File based storage (SMB3) other Ethernet networks. Cost effective storage.
- Faster enumeration of SMI-S storage providers
- Virtual Fibre Channel integration in SC 2012 R2
- SC can now leverage ODX for fast VM copy operations
- Investments in Fibre Channel switch discovery and pulling that into VMM. Shows a demo of creating a FC zone in VMM. Also shows provisioning a LUN from with VMM from a Fibre Channel array. You can configure a LUN in a service template, so all VMs get access to the LUN.
Focused Scenarios for 2012 R2 Wave
- Reducing CAPEX and OPEX
Infrastructure-as-a-Service Storage Vision
- Dramatically lowering the costs and efforts of delivering IaaS storage services
- Disaggregrated compute and storage – Independent management and scale at each layer
- Industry standard servers, networking and storage – Inexpensive networks, inexpensive shared JBOD storage
- Microsoft is heavily investing in the SMB protocol and will use this going forward as the basis of storage
- Overall objective is to reduce cost. The cheapest storage is the storage you already own.
- Ability to use “Spaces” with low cost JBOD
- Ability to manage the full solution within System Center
Storage Management in System Center 2012 R2
- Insight, Flexibility, Automation
- Storage Management API (SM-API)
- New architecture for 10x faster enumerations
- Capacity management, scale-out-file-server, and a lot more
Guest Clustering with shared virtual disks
- Guest clustering with commodity storage
- Sharing VHDX files
- VM presented a shared virtual SAS disk
iSCSI Target Server
- VHDX support
- Support up to 64TB LUNs
- Dynamically grow LUNs
File Based Storage
- SMB Direct support (uses RDMA)
- 50% improvement for small IO workloads
Scale out File Server
- SMB session management for back-end IO distribution
Live Migration
- SMB as a transport for live migration
- Delivers performance using RDMA – so no CPU hit on the host
- Adds compression (75% faster)
SMB Bandwidth Management
- Restrict bandwidth for different workloads (e.g. file copy, live migration, storage access)
Data Deduplication
- Can dedupe open files – VDI scenarios is a good use case
- Good for high reads, low write VHDXs
- Added support for CSV
Storage Spaces
- Optimized data placement – Pool consists of both HDDs and SSDs with automated tiering
- Write-back cache – Smooths out workload IOPS
