Skip to main content

2012 r2 series: enhancements to iaas

oh man, a two-part post! that means twice the reading, twice the summarizing and twice the condensing. :/ oh well. at least all this typing will help warm up my new sculpt keyboard. :) this is the fifth post in the series. read the full post composed of iaas innovations and service provider & tenant iaas experience whenever you get around to it. this covers the first part.

r2 enhancements in networking

Figure1.2

 

r2 enhancements in compute

  • quality of service controls on virtual machine storage while machine is running
  • clustered virtual machines with virtual disks on a separate file server
  • cluster aware updating allows deployment of updates to clustered environments with no downtime
  • exported copies of running virtual machines
  • live migration with compression provides 2x to 3x faster migration, smb direct even faster
  • 2nd gen virtual machines, uefi-based reduces use of emulated legacy devices
  • full remote desktop capabilities (sound, graphics, and most importantly – copy/paste!)
Figure2

 

r2 improvements in storage

  • optimized smb direct which takes advantage of rdma-enabled network cards
  • optimized rebalancing of scale-out file server – smb session transitioned seamlessly to optimal node
  • live migration over smb
    • faster migration over rdma-enabled nic
    • multi-channel capable to stream live migration across multiple nics
  • capability to define different bandwidth limits per category of smb traffic
  • data automatically moved between tiered storage media based on performance need
  • writes to storage satisfied by ssd tier and later written to hdd tier (write-back caching)
  • deduplication available on running virtual machine and cluster shared volumes
  • storage spaces integrated into scvmm
  • storagement management api (sm-api) provides unified management for sans, storage spaces, etc
  • scvmm can deploy/configure clustered scale-out file servers
Figure3.1
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

using preloadpkgonsite.exe to stage compressed copies to child site distribution points

UPDATE: john marcum sent me a kind email to let me know about a problem he ran into with preloadpkgonsite.exe in the new SCCM Toolkit V2 where under certain conditions, packages will not uncompress.  if you are using the v2 toolkit, PLEASE read this blog post before proceeding.   here’s a scenario that came up on the mssms@lists.myitforum.com mailing list. when confronted with a situation of large packages and wan links, it’s generally best to get the data to the other location without going over the wire. in this case, 75gb. :/ the “how” you get the files there is really not the most important thing to worry about. once they’re there and moved to the appropriate location, preloadpkgonsite.exe is required to install the compressed source files. once done, a status message goes back to the parent server which should stop the upstream server from copying the package source files over the wan to the child site. anyway, if it’s a relatively small amount of packages, you can
11 comments
more »

How to Identify Applications Using Your Domain Controller

Problem Everyone has been through it. We've all had to retire or replace a domain controller at some point in our checkered collective experiences. While AD provides very intelligent high availability, some applications are just plain dumb. They do not observe site awareness or participate in locating a domain controller. All they want is the name or IP of one domain controller which gets hardcoded in a configuration file somewhere, deeply embedded in some file folder or setting that you are never going to find. How do you look at a DC and decide which applications might be doing it? Packet trace? Logs? Shut it down and wait for screaming? It seems very tedious and nearly impossible. Potential Solution Obviously I wouldn't even bother posting this if I hadn't run across something interesting. :) I ran across something in draftcalled Domain Controller Isolation. Since it's in draft, I don't know that it's published yet. HOWEVER, the concept is based off
3 comments
more »

sccm: content hash fails to match

back in 2008, I wrote up a little thing about how distribution manager fails to send a package to a distribution point . even though a lot of what I wrote that for was the failure of packages to get delivered to child sites, the result was pretty much the same. when the client tries to run the advertisement with an old package, the result was a failure because of content mismatch. I went through an ordeal recently capturing these exact kinds of failures and corrected quite a number of problems with these packages. the resulting blog post is my effort to capture how these problems were resolved. if nothing else, it's a basic checklist of things you can use.   DETECTION status messages take a look at your status messages. this has to be the easiest way to determine where these problems exist. unfortunately, it requires that a client is already experiencing problems. there are client logs you can examine as well such as cas, but I wasn't even sure I was going to have enough m
3 comments
more »