There are many ways one can go about setting up the networking for an Azure Stack HCI (ASHCI)/Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) cluster. TL;DR Our rule of thumb is to start with four 25GbE ports via two network adapters for multiple nodes requiring switches or even in smaller […]
Windows Server
33 posts
This is what one of our Proof-of-Concept (PoC) rack enclosures looked like before we were finished buttoning things up: Four Node Storage Spaces Direct Cluster with Mellanox 40GbE RoCE Fabric In the end, we did a decent job of wrapping and coiling the massive 40GbE cables and the 250V PDU […]
Server and workstation boards have had SlimSAS 8x connectors for dual NVMe drive setups for quite a long time now. ASRock Rack EPC621D6U-2T16R (BTO Board) The SlimSAS SFF-8654 connector is to the right of the PCIe x16 slot. When they started appearing on server and workstation boards, we began trying […]
We ended up with a situation where a workstation lost trust with the domain. When looking into what was happening on the two Domain Controllers (DCs) on the domain it took a while to figure out just where the problem was. The first error was 1127, failing to write to […]
We took some time today to add the following PowerShell Guide to our repository: New-VM Template: Gen2 SecureBoot Linux We ran into a snag installing the latest Ubuntu Server software with the .ISO refusing to boot unless we turned SecureBoot off. As it turns out, thanks to a pointer from […]
This process may be needed as the cluster grows due to the Health Service creating a somewhat small disk to start with. The following PowerShell will expand the Cluster Performance History Cluster Disk as the initial configured size may not be enough down the road. Variables to change: $VDNewSize = […]
While it’s great to look to an all NVMe deployment as the ideal the budgetary side of things can put a constraint on the configuration we deploy. No matter if we’re deploying a cache to capacity solution with SATA SSD for cache to spinning rust for capacity or NVMe for […]
We’ve taken to deploying a Cloud Witness for almost all of our Windows Server based clusters whether Hyper-V, Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), or Scale-Out File Server. When logging on to the Azure Portal this morning we were prompted to check out a number of different areas by the Azure Advisor. […]
We have been using Intel SATA SSDs in server settings for a very long time now. We have yet to hit one server, all virtualization platforms, exhaust any of the SSDs we’ve deployed. We’ve also been deploying HGST SAS SSDs in production for a very long time now. Same story, […]
We are installing Exchange 2019 CU4 into Server Core 2019 for the first time in a greenfield setting. We a strange snag that turned up very little in the way of search results on the error. The organization name, First,Organization, can’t be used because it contains invalid characters. The setup […]