azure stack hci the best infrastructure for

Azure Stack HCIThe best infrastructure for hybrid

Module 5

Storage

Storage

Learnings Covered in this Unit

Deployment Considerations

Introduction to Storage Spaces

Direct

How to Deploy S2D

Things you need to know about

S2D

Working with S2D

Storage Deployment Considerations

The Goal of this module is to help you

understand key decision points in selecting the

storage technology used for your Virtualization

Infrastructure. .

Microsoft offers industry leading portfolio for building on-premises

clouds

Microsoft embraces your choice of storage

Microsoft offers solutions to reduce storage costs

Choice: On-Premises Storage

File Based StorageBlock StorageSAN AlternativeHyper-Converged Cloud Fabric

Fibre Channel or iSCSI SMB3

Storage Spaces Direct is software-defined,shared-nothing storage.

Use industry-standard hardware to buildlower-cost alternative to traditional storage.

Storage Space Direct

Storage Spaces Direct

delivers blazing fast

storage on industry

standard hardware.

Utilize storage you are

familiar with, PMEM,

NVME, SSD or SAS

Built in Cache Support

Managed by Windows

Admin Center or

PowerShell

Azure Stack HCI

Fault Tolerance

✓ Drive / server / network fault tolerance

✓ Optional rack and chassis awareness

✓ Storage replication for BC/DR (sync or async)

✓ High and continuous availability

Software RAID

✓ Two- and three-way mirror (RAID-1)

✓ Dual parity / erasure coding (RAID-6)

✓ Mirror-accelerated parity

✓ Nested resiliency

✓ Striping (RAID-0)

✓ Single parity (RAID-5)

✓ S.M.A.R.T. predictive drive failure

✓ Drive latency outlier detection

✓ Automatic repair and resync

Software Checksum

✓ File integrity checksum

✓ Automatic in-line corruption correction

✓ Proactive file integrity scrubber

Encryption

✓ Data-at-rest (BitLocker)

✓ Data-in-transit (SMB Encryption)

Efficiency

✓ Kernel-embedded architecture

✓ Remote direct memory access (RDMA)

✓ Data deduplication

✓ Compression

Performance

✓ In-memory cache

✓ Persistent read/write cache

✓ Real-time tiering

✓ Hybrid and all-flash support

✓ Persistent memory / NVDIMM support

✓ Intel® Optane™ NVMe support

✓ NVMe, SATA, SAS support

✓ Instant VHD creation / expansion

✓ Instant VHD checkpoint management

Scale

✓ Petabyte scale

✓ Scale-up and scale-out

✓ Proactive storage balancing

✓ From 2 to 16 servers

✓ From 8 to 400+ drives

✓ Cloud Witness for quorum

✓ Dynamic quorum

Flexibility

✓ Hyper-converged infrastructure (Hyper-V)

✓ Scale-Out File Server (SoFS)

✓ Native SQL Server

Management

✓ Built-In failure and capacity alerting

✓ Built-In performance history

✓ Per-VM Quality of Service (QoS) IOPS limits

✓ 100% scripting-friendly (PowerShell)

✓ System Center Integration

0 1 0 1 0 1

0 1 0 1 0 1

0 1 0 1 0 1

0 1 0 1 0 1

0 1 0 1 0 1

0 0 1 1 0 1

0 1 0 1 0 1

0 1 0 0 1 0

Enterprise-grade software-defined storage

Industry-standard servers with internal drives

No shared storage, no fancy cables – just Ethernet

Let’s cluster them

Software-defined “pool” of storage

We’re ready to create volumes!

Scale-Out File Server (SoFS)

SMB3

File Shares

Hyper-Converged

Add new node to cluster

Under 00:15 of real-world time.

Azure Stack HCI

Windows Server 2016/2019 Datacenter

Included in

at no additional cost

Deploying Storage Spaces Direct


understand methods available to Enabling

Cluster Storage Spaces Direct.

Deploying Storage Spaces Direct

• Windows Admin Center

Easy, Simple Wizard

• Virtual Machine Manager

Simple, One Click in Cluster Creation

• PowerShell

Scalable, Repeatable, Customizable

Enable-ClusterS2D

Windows Admin Center Virtual Machine Manager PowerShell

Storage Spaces Direct Deep Dive


understand the key items that define Storage

Spaces Direct

Storage Spaces Direct

• Disk Types

• Understanding Disk Cache

• Fault Tolerance

• Storage Efficiency

• Storage ReSync and Repair

• iWarp vs ROCE

• ReFS

PMEM: Persistent Memory, including

NVDIMM-N in block mode, DAX mode, and

forthcoming Apache Pass (3D X-Point

DIMM).

Also known as SCM: Storage Class Memory

NVMe: Non-Volatile Memory Express,

connected via the PCIe bus. Includes M.2,

U.2, and AIC form factor, and including

Optane (3D X-Point NVMe SSD).

SSD: Any other Solid-State Drive

connected via SATA or SAS.

HDD: Any Hard Disk Drive

connected via SATA or SAS.

Types of drives

Building a Performance Optimized Solution

SCM for Capacity

SCM + NVMe for Capacity

SCM + SSD for Capacity

OR

OR

NVMe for Capacity

SSD for Capacity

Flat design of all flash delivers

the best IOPS and throughput

Building a Balanced Optimized Solution

OR

OR

NVMe for Cache & SSD for Capacity

Building a Capacity Optimized Solution

OR

OR

Random I/O

Optimized I/O

Built-In, Always-On CacheFastest media (e.g. SSD) provides caching

Each SSD dynamically binds to several HDDs

Independent of pool or volumes, no configuration

All writes up to 256KB, and all reads up to 64KB, are cached

Writes are then de-staged to HDDs in optimal order

Cache drives are selected automatically

Cache behavior is set Automatically

Server Side Architecture

Drive bindings are Dynamic

Handling cache Drive Failures

From 2 – 16 servers, and up to over 400 drives

Over 3 PB of raw storage per cluster

Add servers to scale out

Add drives to scale up

Pool automatically absorbs new drives

Better storage efficiency and performance at larger scale

Converged design greatly simplifies procurement

No special hardware or cables – just Ethernet

Simple Scalability and Expansion

Drive Fault ToleranceUp to 2 simultaneous drive failures*

Data stays safe and continuously accessible

Automatic and immediate repair

Single-step replacement

Drive Fault ToleranceUp to 2 simultaneous drive failures




All data remains safe and accessible





Server Fault ToleranceUp to 2 simultaneous failures

Copies always land in different servers

Accommodates servicing and maintenance

Data resyncs automatically

Dual parity

4+ servers

Three-way mirror

3+ servers

Single parity

Possible but not recommended

Two-way mirror

2 servers

Resiliency types

ReFS volume

Capacity devices

Mirror Parity

File system layer optimizing parity calculation

• Writes land on mirror

• Data later rotated to parity

• Reads happen from either mirror or

parity with equal performance

Caching devices

Device layer real-time caching

• Writes land on caching devices

• Data later rotated to capacity devices

• Reads are cached on caching devices

Mirror-Accelerated Parity

Capacity efficiency in %

Storage performance in IOPS

* Mirror-accelerated parity outperforms dual parity, especially in Windows Server 2019, but three-way mirror remains the clear performance leader.

* Three-way mirror has 33.3% storage efficiency. Dual parity starts at 50.0% and goes up to 80.0%. Mirror-accelerated parity is in between.

Three-way mirror

Dual parity

Mirror-accelerated parity

Three-way mirror

Dual parity

Mirror-accelerated parity

Resiliency Types in Storage Spaces Direct

Mirror for performance

Parity for capacity

Hybrid for balanced

Resiliency Types and efficiency

Volume Mirror Parity Hybrid

Optimized for Performance Capacity Balanced

Use case All data is hot All data is cold Mix of hot and cold

Efficiency Least (33%) Most (57+%) Depends on mix

File System ReFS (or NTFS) ReFS (or NTFS) ReFS

Minimum Nodes 2 4 4

Understanding and Monitoring Storage Resync

* Using standard ASCII 8-bit encodings for each letter

l0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0

e0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1

h0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1

ol0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0

Data to store…

0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1

Copy No. 1

Copy No. 2

0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1

Copy No. 3

0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1

Core Concept – Mirror Resiliency

Monitoring Storage ReSync

Easily view Storage Rebuild

Jobs in Windows Admin

Center

-

View in PowerShell with the

Health Service.

No dedicated storage fabric – just Ethernet

Lots of “East-West” traffic to synchronize data between servers

RDMA allows this to largely bypass CPU, leaving more resources for Virtual Machines!

Remote Direct Memory Access

iWARP is TCP/IP based Safe to drop packet.

Simple to configure.

Speeds up to 100Gb/port

RoCE is UDP based Less communication overhead

Requires lossless infrastructure (PfC, ETS)

Tricky to configure

Speeds up to 200Gb/port

More on this in our Networking Module.

RoCE vs iWARP

When to use NTFS

• In traditional (not Storage Spaces Direct) clusters

▪ As ReFS volume gets redirected to owner on CSV (increased east-west traffic)

• In Shared Storage Spaces deployments

▪ As NTFS tiering can be used (ReFS“tiered” volumes cannot be used on Shared SS)

When to use ReFS

• Storage Spaces Direct Deployments

Including Volumes that need Data Deduplication

• As Filesystem for Backups (DPM, Veeam)

ReFS key features - Resiliency

• Integrity Streams

• ReFS uses checksums for metadata and optionally for file data, giving ReFS the ability to reliably detect corruptions.

• Storage Spaces integration

• automatically looks for alternate data copy)

• Salvaging data

• if alternate copy does not exist, corrupt data are removed from namespace

• Proactive error correction

• ReFS introduces a data integrity scanner, known as a scrubber. Scrubber scans for corruptions and triggers repair.

ReFS key features - Performance

Real-time tier optimization (discussed later in workshop)

Multi-resilient volumes (Mirror-Accelerated parity)

Hybrid volumes (MirrorSSD – MirrorHDD)

VM Optimizations

Block Cloning

Sparse VDL

Scalability

ReFS is designed to support extremely large data sets--millions of terabytes--without negatively impacting performance, achieving greater scale than prior file systems.

ReFS VM Optimizations

Basics

Metadata checksums with optional user data checksum

Data corruption detection and repair

On-volume backup of critical metadata with online repair

Efficient VM Checkpoints and Backup

VHD(x) checkpoints cleaned up without physical data copies

Data migrated between parent and child VHD(x) files as a ReFS metadata

operation

Reduction of I/O to disk

Increased speed

Reduces impact of checkpoint clean-up to foreground workloads

Accelerated Fixed VHD(x) Creation

Fixed VHD(x) files zeroed with metadata operations

Minimal impact on workloads

Decreases VM deployment time

Quick Dynamic VHD(x) Expansion

Dynamic VHD(x) files zeroed with metadata operations

Minimal impact on workloads

Reduces latency spike for foreground workloads

Working with S2SThe Goal of this module is to help you

understand how to do everyday task in S2D.

Create a Volume

Create a Three-Way Mirror

Volume in Admin Center

Create a Mirror Accelerated

Parity Volume in Admin

Center

Turn on De-Duplication and

Compression in Admin Center

Volume Maintenance

Extend a Volume in Admin Center Delete a Volume in Admin Center

Host Maintenance

Verify its Safe to take Server

Offline

Pause/Drain the Server

Shutdown, Reboot Node

Resuming the Node

Waiting for Storage to Resync

azure stack hci the best infrastructure for

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