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I am attending the Emerging Tech Virtual Summit. Join me! #EmergingTechSummit http://aka.ms/ETVS17

Moving into the future, increases in our technological capabilities will be powered by technology out of our sight. Harry Shum, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Technology and Research, calls this the “invisible revolution.” This revolution has become possible because of emerging technologies that didn’t exist a decade ago, like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence.

Join our special event dedicated to how these emerging technologies are changing the world. You’ll hear leading researchers discuss and explore:

• What’s possible with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• How IoT is being used to make farms more productive and feed more people around the world.
• Human-computer interaction and the next wave of user interfaces controlled by voice,
  gaze or gesture.
• How data storage is becoming cheaper and energy-efficient by putting data centers under water.

These powerful technologies are changing the world, and they can have a transformational impact on your business—the products you make, the way you operate and how you engage with your customers. Join this event to learn more.

Save the date and be sure to stay connected with us on Twitter: @MSFT_Business and follow the hashtag to join the conversation: #EmergingTechSummit

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Be sure to register and we’ll notify you as soon as the on-demand version is ready!

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Online Live broadcast (via Channel 9) – https://channel9.msdn.com/ https://channel9.msdn.com/

From 12th September, the MVP led TechDays Online we will be broadcasting live from the Microsoft Campus in Reading. Building on the success of the online event in May, we will be working with our leading MVPs and Community Leaders to deliver bite-size technical sessions that offer a real-world perspective on how our technology is, and can be used by customers and partners.  The 5 day agenda is packed full of community led conversations, demonstrations and how to technical information.  We will be covering; DevOps, the Data Platform, BOTs, HoloLens, Microsoft Azure, IOT along with innovations from the team at Microsoft Research Cambridge.  

This event will be taking place at the Microsoft Campus in Reading and each day will offer the following topics:

· Monday, 12 September: Explore the world of Data Platform and BOTs

· Tuesday, 13 September: DevOps in practice

· Wednesday, 14 September: A day at the Office!

· Thursday, 15 September: The inside track on Azure and UK Datacenter

· Friday, 16 September: Find out more about Artificial Intelligence

 

Get your Free Ticked here.

Link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/techdays-online-september-2016-led-by-mvps-tickets-27251539087?ref=estw

 

 

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VMGroups how does this work and how can I use it.

Suppose you have some Hyper-v Machine’s and running Azure Stack and the VM’s have all follow up codes and there are say 1000 DC and 2000 File servers etc this is a hard time to manage. So there for in Windows Server 2016 you can work with VMGroups. So you don’t have to list all 11151 VM’s on the Hyper-v server to manage a VM you can create groups and manage the Group.  multiple changes in one simple action.

All these options are PowerShell only there is no GUI or indication that there is a configuration active So be careful when you are starting with this.

Just a Quick selection how many VM’s are on this host.

First check what commands we have Add-Get-New-Remove

Get-Command *vmgroup* to get a listing on the Group commands

VM groups comes in two types

• VM collections: which is a logical collection of VMs on which you can take some actions at the level group.
• Management collection: is a logical collection of VM collection groups and or mixed groups

VM Groups can be used when doing the same task to multiple VM’s say backing up Shared VHDX or setting up Replication or start stop VM’s . Its also provide easy management of multiple VMs when using VM Collection Groups.

First we need to create a new group

In this sample I’m using several groups as I have a lot off VM’s running on this Hyper-V server they are divided in several groups.

as the –Verbose will show you some text on what the command did.

# Create new VM Group
New-VMGroup -Name AstackDC -GroupType VMCollectionType –Verbose

Now that the Group is created we can add members to the group. as Currently there are no members in any group

Get-VMGroup |SELECT NAME,VMMEMBERS

As I have a lot off VM’s with all follow up numbers if need to combine them and not picking them by hand.

First my first 20 Machines are all tenant Domain controllers I create a VM group to combine all these DC’s

$AstackDCten=1..10 | % { Get-VM -Name azurestvm0$_}

#Add VMs to the VM Collection Groups

$AstackDCten=1..10 | % { Get-VM -Name azurestvm0$_}
Add-VMGroupMember -VMGroup (Get-VMGroup AstackDCten) -VM $AstackDCten
Get-VMGroup AstackDCten

Suppose you want to do maintenance on the DC’s you could create a A and B group and during patching you reboot A first and then B.  It is all possible.

#View the membership of the groups
Get-VM | ft Name, Groups -AutoSize

Get-VMGroup AstackDC

As you can see there are now multiple ways to show the VM’s  Say you have a test lab or during maintenance you want to stop some VM’s

#Perform actions on the group as if it were a VM
Stop-VM -VM (Get-VMGroup AstackDC).VMMembers
Start-VM -VM (Get-VMGroup AstackDC).VMMembers

Or you can setup a VM replication

Enable-VMReplication -VM (Get-VMGroup AstackDC).VMMembers –ReplicaServerName SOFS08 -ReplicaServerPort 50001 -AuthenticationType Kerberos -CompressionEnabled 1 -ReplicationFrequencySec 30 -AutoResynchronizeEnabled 1  –recoveryhistory 4 –vsssnapshotfrequency 4

Or check the memory and upgrade all VM’s in a group Plenty of options there.

 

#Create combined VM Management Group with AstackDC and AstackDCten

New-VMGroup -Name MgmtDCGroup -GroupType ManagementCollectionType

Add-VMGroupMember -VMGroup (Get-VMGroup MgmtDCGroup) -VMGroupMember (Get-VMGroup AstackDC)
Add-VMGroupMember -VMGroup (Get-VMGroup MgmtDCGroup) -VMGroupMember (Get-VMGroup AstackDCten)

Get-VMGroup -Name MgmtDCGroup

#Create VM Management Group with MgmtDCGroup and AVMDCWAPGroup to show nesting

New-VMGroup -Name MgmtDCFullGroup -GroupType ManagementCollectionType

Add-VMGroupMember -VMGroup (Get-VMGroup MgmtDCFullGroup ) -VMGroupMember (Get-VMGroup MgmtDCGroup )
Add-VMGroupMember -VMGroup (Get-VMGroup MgmtDCFullGroup ) -VMGroupMember (Get-VMGroup AVMDCWAPGroup )
Get-VMGroup MgmtDCFullGroup | Select-Object -ExpandProperty VMGroupMembers

As you can see with a view VM’s this is not that complicated but with a large amount of VM’s this can rapidly grow to a uncontrolled situation. As this must be done from PowerShell use the ISE if you do something wrong you can easily delete the groups and add them again and think about the group names and members before you start

VM Collection Groups are fairly simple. They maintain a membership of virtual machines, those VM groups contain actual VMs.

Management Collection Groups

The Management Collection Groups, on the other hand maintain a membership of VM Collection Groups. Please note that VMs cannot directly belong to the membership of a management collection.

The group name for VM and Management collection groups might be confusing a little bit, in order to differentiate between both groups, we can refer to the collection group using the first name “VM” (membership of individual virtual machines), and “Management” “MGMT” (membership of VM groups).

 

VMGROUP Removal

If you want to delete the management collection group, you need to remove first the VM groups from the management collection and then delete the management group.

The following PowerShell script will allow you to do so:
# Remove VM Group Members from Management Collection
Remove-VMGroupMember -VMGroup (Get-VMGroup MgmtDCGroup) -VMGroupMember (Get-VMGroup AstackDCten) –Verbose

Remove-VMGroupMember -VMGroup (Get-VMGroup MgmtDCGroup) -VMGroupMember (Get-VMGroup AstackDC) -Verbose

remove-VMGroup -Name MgmtDCGroup –Verbose

So always remove the nested Groups first there is no Force option that deletes the whole Tree at once.

When there are no nested groups or VM’s in the group you can delete the Group.

VM management is getting more complicated as the VM’s are growing and central management is great and now with the VMgroups you can easy manage a large amount of VM single handed.

 

Flickr Tags: Windows Server 2016,Hyper-v,VMGROUPS,Azure,Cloud

 

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Cloud Witness is a new type of Failover Cluster quorum witness being introduced in Windows Server 2016. But you will need an Azure Subscription to use this unless you are using your own private cloud to use a file share witness in a third  DataCenter. As this post is an edited post but still actual

Earlier I create a blog post about creating a file share in Azure.

https://robertsmit.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/microsoft-azure-file-server-system-error64-or-new-azurestorageshare-cannot-bind-parameter-context-azure-cloud-mvpbuzz/

But now this file share can also be used for your Private Cluster Or Azure Cluster but remember your cluster needs internet access to connect to Microsoft Azure.

 

Edited 5-11-2014 <>>>>>>

So if you want to have a file witness then you will need the fileshare option but the cloud witness is using the BLOB storage and will cost you almost noting with Azure Credits

However the File share is still in preview under Windows Azure Files  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn167006.aspx

Sign up for a preview http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/storage-backup-recovery/

Now that we have created a new storage account We can use this for the cluster.

If you select the storage account you will see something like this.

We are using the blob storage and skip the above but you can use this for other things

<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

At the bottom you can select the Manage Access Keys. This is the information we needed for the cluster.

Keep this save ! You will need this in your cluster.

When opening my windows Cluster Failover manager under more actions you can configure the quorum settings.

As always we do the Advance configuration.

Now we check the Cloud Witness option.

We use the Account name and the Key from the Azure portal that we created earlier.

The screen may differ as you could have a different version!

And we have a Cloud Witness here configured in my Public Cloud.

We don’t need a site to site VPN just connect the Cluster nodes to Internet ( atleast a Azure connection )

If we check the Azure Configuration and there you can see the creation of MSFT-Cloud-Witness. With the files in the blob storage.

 

 

You can also configure this in azure.

With the Get-ClusterQuorum we find quickly what witness we have.

and Configuring this is also quickly done put your account name and key in the set-clusterquorum and it will create a Cloud Witness.

Set-ClusterQuorum -AccessKey V7CR1/DijezGyA== -AccountName clusterw10 –CloudWitness

Happy clustering

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Topology Dashboard

When Using OMS you can benefit of the Network Performance Monitor (NPM), that helps you perform near real-time monitoring of network performance parameters (such as packet loss and network latency) and localize network faults. It not only detects network performance issues, but it also localizes the source of the problem to a particular network segment or device to make it easy for you to locate and fix a network performance issue.

You can detect network issues with the solution dashboard which displays summarized information about your network including recent network health events, unhealthy network links, and subnetwork links that are facing high packet loss and latency. You can drill-down into a network link to view the current health status of subnetwork links as well as node-to-node links.

So what to do to get the full benefit of the NPM.

Deploying NPM involves four basic steps.
1. Enabling the solution on your OMS workspace
2. Installing the OMS agents
3. Configuring the OMS agents
4. Configuring the solution.

I Assume you already have the OMS Agent in place and connected and reporting to OMS,if not below are two screens on how to enable the NPM and installing the Agent. And a lot of cool new features are there.

Installing the OMS agent Windows Or Linux.

 

Firewall ports are required to be opened on the servers so that the agents can connect to each other.

Run the script without any parameters in a power shell window with administrative privileges. This script creates few registry keys required by NPM and creates windows firewall rules to allow agents to create TCP connections with each other

The port opened by default would be 8084. You have the option of using a custom port by providing the parameter ‘portNumber’ to the script. However, the same port should be used on all the machines where the script is executed.

Note that the script will configure only windows firewall locally. If you have a network firewall you should make sure that it is allowing traffic destined for the TCP port being used by NPM

OMS Network Performance Monitor Agent Configuration Script

Now that the solution is enabled we can configure some networks. All the networks are discovered by the Agent and it will turn-up automatically.

 

You can Add a new network ( read this as a Name ) as we give the IP subnet a name and link the subnet to the network

Give the network a name and link the subnet to It

And don’t forget to save the network. now that the networks have names it is easier to understand the networks.

When looking at the nodes you can easily see what networks the machine is using

The monitoring of the networks

If you don’t want to monitor Certain networks you can disable the monitoring of this network.

 

Set monitoring rules

Network Performance Monitor generates health events about the connectivity between a pair of nodes or subnetwork or network links when a threshold is breached. These thresholds can be learned automatically by the system or you can configure them custom alert rules.

The Default rule is created by the system and it creates a health event whenever loss or latency between any pair of networks or subnetwork links breaches the system-learned threshold. You can choose to disable the default rule and create custom monitoring rules

In the monitoring rules you can create a special rule set say for the SQL server , Webservers or DMZ / ISCSI networks with each a set of his own rules.

With all this in place and when things are running you may need to tweak the thresholds a bit.

There a great in depth overviews and you can adjust them to drip down.

Normally this is not the best view for a network but this is a test lab and machines are not always running.

If you click the View topology map link, you will see the hop-by-hop topology of the routes between the source and destination nodes. The unhealthy routes or hops will be colored in red, which will help you to quickly localize the problem to a particular section of the network.

 

And if you want to get more detail about your network drill down and adjust the time setting from 7 days to 6 hours

to get a Daily overview with OMS Network Performance Monitor with the data based on 6 hours

Get a good view of the latency of your network between servers/ HOP’s

Log Analytics search

All data that is exposed graphically through the Network Performance Monitor dashboard and drill-down pages is also available natively in Log Analytics search. You can query the data using the search query language and create custom reports by exporting the data to Excel or PowerBI. The Common Queries blade in the dashboard has some useful queries that you can use as the starting point for creating your own queries and reports.

More and more new OMS features are coming so I guess the data Size is still Growing

 

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Configuring a new Server management tools Gateway

Server management tools is an Azure service that offers a set of web-based GUI and command line tools to manage Windows Servers. This is especially useful when managing headless servers such as Nano Server and Server Core. These tools also provide rapid access to your on-premises infrastructure in a common dashboard alongside your Azure resources, thereby providing a consistent management experience across your infrastructure. Server management tools supports a set of basic server diagnostic tools.  The Tools are working on Windows Server 2012,Windows Server 2012R2,Windows Server 2016 and Nano Server

Server management tools requires a gateway which can be configured on any server in your environment. The gateway enables communication between the Microsoft Azure portal and your Windows Server machines, whether on-premises in your infrastructure, or hosted in a cloud provider.

A while a go I already created a blog post on this but as there are so many new features a fresh post is in place.

https://robertsmit.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/azure-server-management-tools-offers-a-set-of-web-gui-tools-to-manage-azurestack-servers-rsmt-asmt/

Even now that my wish on the Uservoice is added to the Service Management Tools #SMT the tools are getting better all the time.

How are things working below is a schematic overview.

 

A Server management tools gateway is required to enable communication between the Microsoft Azure portal and your Windows Server 2016 machines. A gateway is typically deployed and configured on the same local network as the Windows Server machine(s) you wish to manage. The machine must have an internet connection.

Building the Connection go to Azure and look for Server Management Tools

check the Server Management tools and a new right screen will open

Just check Create.

A common mistake is give the computer name and the gateway the same name. but this will Fail!!

Important Item In the Computer name and the Gateway name can’t be the same name It can but you will not be able to manage this server remotely.

provide the NAME/IP/FQDN of the machine you want to connect to ( so not the GATEWAY SERVER )

If this is the first Server management tools connection you are creating, you will also need to choose to create a new Server management tools gateway and give it a name. You will be prompted to complete the gateway configuration after the Server management tools connection is created.

 

When creating the gateway you need to do little configuration on the Gateway server local

I choose for automatic updates and you will need to generate a link with the gateway package

 

check the generate a package link and use this link to install the gateway

https://pdrsmtrppreviewneu.blob.core.windows.net/ce12af764058e42b8a603d3c2c77f1915/gateway.

 

1. Use the generated link to download the gateway deployment package now, or copy the link URL to download the package later from the machine on which you intend to install the package.

2. From the machine that you want to designate as the gateway, unzip the package and run GatewayService.MSI.

3. Once the gateway installation completes, return to the Microsoft Azure portal and reopen your Server management tools connection.

4. You should now be able to manage your Windows Server 2016 machine if the Microsoft Azure portal can reach it through the gateway.

now that the Gateway is installed you should see a OK status in the Azure console if not you need to do some extra settings.

After OK status

In case the Ok is not showing check your Firewall or past the rule below in the Firewall

NETSH advfirewall firewall add rule name="WinRM 5985" protocol=TCP dir=in localport=5985 action=allow

If you wish to connect using the local Administrator account, you will need to enable this policy on the target machine by running the following command in an administrator session on the target machine:

REG ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy /t REG_DWORD /d 1

And if the WinRM settings are not in place you will need to set the correct winrm settings as well,

winrm set winrm/config/client @{ TrustedHosts="10.255.255.59" }

Change the IP with your own server when you set this on the manage server the trusted host must be the gateway server.

Now that the Service Management Tools Gateway is in place and working the Service Management Tools Connections needs configuration and this is where all the magic happens.

when opening the Service Management Tools Connections you will need to set the administrator credentials else you can’t connect and do stuff on your server.

 

You can save the Credentials or Fill the in every time you need the Service Management Tools Connections for you server. A new feature is Persist credentials

The ability to save the credentials used to manage the target machines. From the credential entry dialog, you can opt to store credentials securely. The credentials are first encrypted using standard AES 256 encryption and then securely stored within Azure. These credentials can only be decrypted using the certificate which is stored in the Server management tools gateway. When you go to manage an instance, the encrypted credentials are passed down to the Server management tools gateway for decryption, and are then used to process all management requests on the target machine. Even though the credentials are securely stored in Azure, the on-premises certificate provides an additional level of security because only your gateway can decrypt the stored credentials since only your gateway has the certificate used to encrypt them. The certificate used to encrypt the credentials is never passed to Azure and the Azure service will never have access to unencrypted user credentials.

 

A brief overview of the server you can customize the view but the more you put in the overview the slower the content is showing in the browser. Unless you need it.

A long list of options and server management tools are there and the list is getting longer, File Explorer,Firewall rules and PowerShell script saving and Certificate manager are all new to the Service Management Tools Connections.

 

PowerShell script editor enhancements

The script editor is now equipped with basic file browsing capabilities. You can browse through the files on the target machine and open an existing script. You can create a new script or modify an existing one and save it on the target machine.

Script editor is now also integrated with your Azure Blob storage. You can save your scripts in your blob and make them available across all your servers and to other members of the subscription.

As the script editor can save the scripts or open the scripts from a blob account so you don’t need to type everything for each server

the one thing is missing here is creating a Storage Account. this would be handy if you could create one here.

 

On the Storage account you can create a container for you files or if you already have one place the files in this container.

But when you don’t want to place the files in Azure and leaf them on your server this is also an option.

 

the File Explorer is a great option to look and use files on the Server and when you look at the storage you will see all the drives and what a great feature it shows even unhealthy drives.

The Certificate manager is also new to the server management tools

It brings the much needed ability to remotely manage certificates on targeted computers. With capabilities such as viewing all or a specific set of certificates, along with relevant event log channels, it helps you to find the root cause of certificate related issues. You can also import, export and delete certificates.

As you can see I  play a lot with the Certificates on the Hyper-V server guess it is time to do some certificate cleaning.

 

Flickr Tags: Cluster,VMM,Storage,Windows Server 2016,ReFS,clustermvp,The Windows Server HA Blog,Azure,SMT,server management tools,gold

 

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Storage Spaces deployment tools

Windows Server 2016 comes with al lot of new options and Hyper-converged is one of the new options. In this blog post I’ll show you what options you have when using VMM and S2D. The tools are great but so is PowerShell and it always depends on what and how you are building things.

Storage Spaces Direct is a bit like building a Do It Your Self San multiple heads lots of Storage can lose one Head , low costs.

Storage Spaces Direct seamlessly integrates with the Hyper-V / Files Servers you know today. The Windows Server 2016 software defined storage stack, including Clustered Shared Volume File System (CSVFS), Storage Spaces and Failover Clustering.

The hyper-converged deployment scenario has the Hyper-V servers and Storage Spaces Direct components on the same cluster. Virtual machine’s files are stored on local CSVs. This allows for scaling Hyper-V clusters together with the storage it is using. Once Storage Spaces Direct is configured (Enable-ClusterS2D) and the CSV volumes are available, configuring and provisioning Hyper-V is the same process and uses the same tools that you would use with any other Hyper-V deployment on a failover cluster. but now with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2016 we can also configure this during the deployment.

Above are the layers shown, as you can see the Storage is defined in 3 parts physical disks, spaces and the CSV volumes.

So basically we can configure the cluster with Storage Spaces Direct by hand (PowerShell) or if you are using VMM you can do this by using templates and the GUI. but is this the same and is this handy ? The only change I did in this post is create a Scale out file server to use the Storage Spaces Direct volumes.

Well it is nice that you can do this but when configuring this by hand it gives you much more flexibility and configuration and yes maybe more complex but understanding the method is better than following a wizard.

Let see the options we have in VMM there are a couple of ways to configure this it all depends.

Create a Hyper-V cluster and tap the enable Storage Spaces Direct option.

 

Or Create a Scale Out file server and check what you want shared Storage or enable Storage Spaces Direct option.

But you can also Create the cluster in VMM and configure later the Storage Spaces Direct. The fact is that VMM 2016 can create and maintain the Storage layer. all from a single interface.

So for this demo I use 4 Servers Sofs02,Sofs04,Sofs06,Sofs08 each server has 8 local Disks

 

These 4 servers will be transformed to a Storage Space Direct Cluster

first let me check of all the disks on the server.

Get-PhysicalDisk | ? CanPool -EQ 1 | FT FriendlyName, BusType, MediaType, Size

Storage Spaces Direct uses BusType and MediaType to automatically configure caching, storage pool and storage tiering. In Hyper-V virtual machines, the media type is reported as unspecified. So if you are using tools that are expecting certain types of disk you need to fix this.

else when running the cluster validation the cluster creation will fail.

Found a disk with unsupported media type on node ‘Sofs02.mvp.local’. Supported media types are SSD and HDD.

Step one is creating a Hyper-v cluster.

 

As my servers are in the Storage VMM host group I’ll pick this group. Give the cluster a name and Check the Storage Spaces Direct check box.

So typical when creating this by hand you would do this in PowerShell

install-WindowsFeature "Failover-Clustering","RSAT-Clustering" -IncludeAllSubFeature –ComputerName “sofs02”,”sofs04”,”sofs06”,”sofs08”

Test-Cluster -Node “sofs02”,”sofs04”,”sofs06”,”sofs08”

New-Cluster –Name Democlu201 -Node “sofs02”,”sofs04”,”sofs06”,”sofs08”  -NoStorage -StaticAddress "10.255.255.110"

Enable-ClusterS2D -CacheMode Disabled -AutoConfig:0 –SkipEligibilityChecks  ( as you are running VHDX disks )

The big difference here is you can’t customize this cluster during this step so no Quorum or any other settings.

Selecting all the nodes

Giving the Cluster a Fix IP or pick one random from the IP pool

All the tasks are running an in a few minutes we have a Cluster that holds a Storage Space Direct unless it Fails the cluster validation test.

If you are using the S2D you must run the Cluster validation test and remember only SSD and HDD media type Disks are supported. So if the media type is unspecified or unknown the Validation report will fail and so is this job.

In our case the job went successful and the cluster with Storage Space Direct is ready for usage.

Now that the cluster is ready you can use the Storage after creating the pool.

And if you already have build a hyper-converged  Cluster Hyper-V servers and Storage Spaces Direct components then you can us this also in VMM.

Now that the Cluster is added we can create a Pool.

In case you build the Storage Spaces Direct with Powershell you end up with something like this :

#Create storage pool 
New-StoragePool  -StorageSubSystemName Pool01.mvp.local –FriendlyName Pool01 -WriteCacheSizeDefault 0 -FaultDomainAwarenessDefault StorageScaleUnit -ProvisioningTypeDefault Fixed -ResiliencySettingNameDefault Mirror -PhysicalDisk (Get-StorageSubSystem  -Name Pool01.mvp.local| Get-PhysicalDisk)

#list Storage pool

Get-StoragePool Pool01

#removal of the Storagepool 
Remove-StoragePool –Name Pool01.mvp.local

But when using the VMM Gui tool you will not get the friendly name as when you do this in Powershell

But this is easy changable

TO check if the Cluster Storage Spaces Direct is enabled you can run a PowerShell command

(Get-Cluster).S2DEnabled

Or check your Cluster under Storage en Enclosures Every server is listed as his own enclosure.

Now that the Enclosures are listed We create the pools and the disks

We select the Clustered Pool and do manage to create the Virtual disk

We create a New Pool and if you not created a Classification you will need to do this to.

Give this a name and Pick the disk that you want I select all the Disk and use them for one big Pool.

Now that we have selected all the disk and created the pool we can create a Virtual disk on the Pool

Creating the disk can be a little confusing in the VMM GUI as you need to press Cancel and OK.

Give the disk a name

Pick the right Size as my pool s 168GB and I can only do a Mirror you understand I can’t create a 160Gb disk, I have 4 nodes press ca

 

How can this guide help you? You can use this guide and the Software-Defined Storage Design Calculator spreadsheet to design a storage solution that uses the Storage Spaces and Scale-Out File Server functionality of Windows Server 2012 R2 along with cost-effective servers and shared serial-attached SCSI (SAS) storage enclosures.

#Create virtual disks
New-Volume –StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool01 -FriendlyName CSV02 -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 1 -FileSystem CSVFS_REFS –Size 48GB

As you can see I created a Scale out file server and used the Storage Spaces Direct as storage.

#create Cluster
New-StorageFileServer –StorageSubSystemName DemoClu201.mvp.local –FriendlyName Demosofs201 -HostName Demosofs201.mvp.local -Protocols SMB

#Create file shares and Folders 
md C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\shares\VM01

New-SmbShare –Name VM01 -Path C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1\shares\VM01 -FullAccess "mvp\Domain Admins"

Now that the File share and SOFS is in place we can add the share to the hyper-v server or cluster for usage.

When creating a VM we can use the Storage Spaces Direct to place a VM but as you can see in this post there are several methods to do things and each option has a different choice the right one well it is all on you and it depends. see this table below with the pros and cons.

Tool	Advantages	Disadvantages
Failover Cluster Manager & Server Manager	Easy to use	Slow automatic refreshes in Server Manager when working with storage Some tasks require Windows PowerShell No automation can make provisioning more than a couple virtual disks and file shares tedious
System Center Virtual Machine Manager	Easy to use Partial automation of cluster deployment Automated management of file share permissions Can be used to deploy and manage VMs	Some tasks require Windows PowerShell (including storage tiers) Requires System Center licenses Might require additional infrastructure if you don’t already have System Center or are deploying at a scale that’s greater than your existing deployment can handle
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit	Lots of control over operating system installation options Can be used to deploy other PCs and servers	Can be complex Some approaches require System Center Configuration Manager licenses
Windows PowerShell	Complete control over all aspects of storage Can automate by writing scripts	Requires knowledge of Windows PowerShell Scripts require development and testing

After writing this post I can see If you should do this then I would use PowerShell to build the cluster and Storage Spaces direct and add them to VMM but for deploying the basics VMM could be very handy but it all depends on your infra structure.

The VMM option is really great but for me it takes to long to do stuff and often the job fails because I made a typo or the naming is not the way I want it. And the usage of the Storage Spaces Well the Hyper-Converged option vs the Converged option it has it challenges and it all depends on the hardware you have. but for my testlab or in Azure S2D runs great.

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