With the release of the Windows Server Technical Preview, a lot of new features are there as Storage Replica.

Storage Replica enables storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between clusters or servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability. Synchronous replication enables mirroring of data in physical sites with crash-consistent volumes ensuring zero data loss at the file system level. Asynchronous replication allows site extension beyond metropolitan ranges with the possibility of data loss.

In this post I take a look a this and see if it is working in the demo lab, My first impression is this needs planning and this is not that easy and how does this work. Well you need to play with this the get the feeling.

In this case I build a normal cluster just a set of disk with a file server on it and two nodes both running the Windows Server 10.

For the disk you will need some steps to prepare not all disk are suitable for the

Disk prerequisites :

You must create two volumes on each enclosure: one for data and one for logs.
Data volumes must be formatted as GPT, not MBR
The two data volumes must be of identical size.
The two log volumes should be of identical size.
The log volume should use SSD storage with a mirrored space or RAID 1/RAID 10
The data volume can use HDD, SSD, or a tiered combination and can use either mirrored or parity spaces or RAID 1 or 10, or RAID 5 or RAID 50
The data volume should be no larger than 10TB (for a first test, we recommend no more than 1TB, in order to lower initial replication sync times)
The log volume should be at least 10% of the size of the data volume and must be at least 2GB

As you create a role and added a disk to this there is an new option Replication on the Disk

On a available disk the replication is grayed out.

Added the Disk to a Cluster Role the Replication can be enabled.

Currently the GUI is not the best method to test this.

Starting With Windows Volume Replication On windows Server

I use a cluster based on shared VHDX.

I just need to create some disks and add them to the cluster nodes

1..8 | % { New-VHD -Path n:\hyper-v\WVR_SSD_$_.VHDX -Fixed –Size 12GB}

1..8 | % { Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName windows10-node1 -ControllerType SCSI -Path n:\hyper-v\WVR_SSD_$_.VHDX -ShareVirtualDisk}
1..8 | % { Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName windows10-node2 -ControllerType SCSI -Path n:\hyper-v\WVR_SSD_$_.VHDX -ShareVirtualDisk}

So what is needed to get this working, is an extra feature installed on both nodes Windows Volume Replication

When starting to build our cluster we installed all our features

add-windowsfeature Failover-Clustering,WVR,RSAT-Clustering –IncludeAllSubFeature

After this we get new powershell commands from the WVR Windows Volume Replication

and with the new-cluster we create a new Cluster

New-Cluster -Name Windowscl10 -Node win2015-1,win2015-2 -NoStorage -StaticAddress "10.255.255.21"

Get-ClusterAvailableDisk –Cluster Windowscl10 |Add-ClusterDisk

Now that the cluster is in place with the disk we can start and we create a new File server and add two disks to this File server Role.

It does not need to be a scale-out file server.

Next step is create a Storage Replication Partnership based on Source and Destination with the Replication Groups

This can also be done in the GUI.

New-SRPartnership -SourceComputerName win2015-1 -SourceRGName resource_group01 -SourceVolumeName p: -SourceLogVolumeName h: -DestinationComputerName win2015-2 -DestinationRGName resource_group02 -DestinationVolumeName I: -DestinationLogVolumeName J: -LogSizeInBytes 2gb

but the destination disk is not selectable. and in PowerShell it is working.

But you can also follow this guide in the GIU : a downloadable guide to provide you with step-by-step instructions for evaluating the Stretch Cluster and the Server-to-Server scenarios. These are both designed for Disaster Recovery and provide “over the river” synchronous metro replication.

When first playing with this and added just a couple of drives I got this “ disk with different Sizes”

Possible reasons:
– log size in those two groups are different.
– data partition sizes are different in those two groups.
– data partition physical section size are different in those two groups.

So keep in mind the Disk need to be GPT and the size must be the same.

New-SRPartnership : Unable to create replication partnership between "rg01" and "rg02", detail reason: "Replication groups "rg01" and "rg02" do not
match. Possible reasons:

– log size in those two groups are different.
– data partition sizes are different in those two groups.
– data partition physical section size are different in those two groups.".
At line:1 char:1
+ New-SRPartnership -SourceComputerName win2015-1 -SourceRGName rg01 -S …
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (MSFT_WvrAdminTasks:root/Microsoft/…T_WvrAdminTasks) [New-SRPartnership], CimException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Windows System Error 4,New-SRPartnership

Building the Windows Volume Replication

First create the new Replication Partnership.

And I must say there is a lot of things going on in your cluster and disk when you do this. watch your cluster Failover manager! and select the Disk view !

But after this you got a working replication.

All the Available disk are moved from one node to the other node and there will be a new resource group

and the output will be like this

ComputerName       : Windows10
Description        :
Id                 : 279b4fb3-239f-4238-a3dd-fdd42fb8f772
IsAutoFailover     : True
IsCascade          : False
IsCluster          : True
IsInPartnership    : True
IsPrimary          : True
IsSuspended        : False
IsWriteConsistency : False
LogSizeInByte      : 2147483648
LogVolume          : H:\
Name               : resource_group01
NumOfReplicas      : 1
Partitions         : {776e66b8-f26c-4480-85bf-c37df3a58e98}
PSComputerName     :
ReplicationMode    :

Now Close the FCM GUI and reopen this else you won’t see the replication tabs

After the GUI restart you can see the replication.

and as you can see the source resource is also in the destination resource. So in case of a failover the replica will also be briefly down.

And if you want to reverse the source destination with the GET-SRPartnership

Set-SRPartnership -NewSourceComputerName win2015-2 -SourceRGName resource_group02 -DestinationComputerName win2015-1 -DestinationRGName resource_group01

In the Event log you can find the WVR ( windows Volume Replication ) this is a separate Event log

As you can see in the event log the replication is there and working.

There are a few PowerShell commands to see if things are working.

Get-SRPartnership

There is no info in the GUI as this is a Preview.

This is a nice new playground and I can see the benefit of this.

There is a great guide from Microsoft on how to to this wit more background information on WVR

Download the guide:

Windows Server Technical Preview Storage Replica Guide – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=514902

Download Windows Server Technical Preview evaluations:

TechNet Evaluation Center (US): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-server-vnext-technical-preview
TechNet Evaluation Center (worldwide): http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dn781243
MSDN subscribers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/

To help you get familiar with Storage Replica, we have a downloadable guide to provide you with step-by-step instructions for evaluating the Stretch Cluster and the Server-to-Server scenarios. These are both designed for Disaster Recovery and provide “over the river” synchronous metro replication.

Happy clustering

Robert Smit

@clusterMVP

https://robertsmit.wordpress.com