Tag: storage spaces

My first book is published! (VMM 2016 Cookbook)

My first book that I have been working day and night on for the last four months is published and globally available! The System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2016 Cookbook (English, 575 pages) includes multiple tips, tricks and techniques to help you make the perfect VMM fabric (see What this book covers  section at the bottom of this post for details)

I have done a complete makeover of the previous edition and,therefore, we have the  chapters written from the scratch, plenty of new recipes and revised old ones to meet changes in VMM 2016.  This book is essentially intended to system engineers, solution architects, administrators and anyone who want to learn and master Virtual Machine Manager 2016 (however, since we have two channels (LTSB/SAC), you will also find references to the latest VMM 1801 release in the semi-annual channel).

The book is available in paperback and ebook formats at Amazon and Packt

Please don’t forget to write your feedback/review on Amazon.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to work during this project. This book would not be possible without Packt team who found me and offered to take up the writing. I say thank you to Devika Battike, Manish Shanbhag, Heramb Bhavsar and Prateek Bharadwaj for supporting and helping me along the way.

A special thank goes to Edvaldo Alessandro Cardoso, an author of two previous editions, for an active participation and for being a technical reviewer together with Tomica Kaniski. I could not have finished this edition without your help.

In addition, I wish to mention the Microsoft team for helping to make this book as accurate as possible, in particular: Steven Ekren, Elden Christensen Sai Prasanna Vudataneni, Krupesh Dhruva and Sonal Agarwal. I am pretty sure our long discussions and your feedbacks will be appreciated by readers.

I have worked nonstop on the book for the last months and truly couldn’t survive without my family. Nobody has been more important to me than you. Thank you very much for your support, inspiration and love.

What this book covers
  • Chapter 1, VMM 2016 Architecture, provides an understanding of the VMM modular architecture, which is useful when designing VMM and troubleshooting deployment. This chapter also covers all requirements that must be satisfied to make a private cloud.
  • Chapter 2, Upgrading from Previous Versions, walks through all the necessary steps to upgrade the previous version of Virtual Machine Manager to the new VMM 2016, covering its database, highly available configurations and post-upgrade tasks.
  • Chapter 3, Installing VMM 2016, focus on deploying VMM and it’s dependencies. It gives also a plenty of tips and tricks to install and automate VMM and SQL Server deployments in both Windows Server Core and Full environments.
  • Chapter 4, Installing a High Available VMM Server, dives into more advanced VMM configuration, and provides an understanding how VMM has become a critical part of the private cloud infrastructure. You will also learn how to make a highly available library server and VMM configuration database.
  • Chapter 5, Configuring Fabric Resources, discusses building a new fabric in VMM by configuring compute, storage and networking resources. It starts by adding hosts group and ends by creating a hyper-converged cluster with Storage Spaces Direct and Hyper-V. It also covers a deployment of a Network Controller providing a good start point for network virtualization implementation.
  • Chapter 6, Configuring Guarded Fabric, walks you through the recipes to help protect confidential data by deploying new shielded VMs as a part of Guarded Fabric consisting of Guarded Hosts and Host Guardian Service. It also discusses how to convert existing VMs to shielded and manage them through VMM.
  • Chapter 7, Deploying Virtual Machines and Services, provides information to help the administrator to create,deploy and manage private clouds, virtual machines, templates, and services in VMM 2016; it provides recipes to assist you in getting the most our of deployment.
  • Chapter 8, Managing VMware ESXi Hosts, shows you how to manage and make VMware recources available to private cloud deployments. It also covers converting VMware machines to Hyper-V (V2V), deploying virtual machines and templates, all from the VMM console.
  • Chapter 9, Managing Clouds, Fabric Updates, Resources, Clusters and the New Features of 2016, covers other new features of VMM 2016 such as Cluster OS Rolling upgrade and Production Checkpoints. You will also learn how to integrate VMM 2016 with Windows Azure Pack for VM Clouds management.
  • Chapter 10, Integration with System Center Operations Manager 2016, guides you through the steps required to complete integration of SCOM 2016 with VMM in order to enable monitoring of the private cloud infrastructure.

VMM 2016 Cookbook

Code Files

 

S2D: disks don’t show up in the disk manager

When you configure S2D cluster with autoconfig=yes or using VMM, S2D creates storage pool with all disks of which parameter CanPool is True. For example, if you have 2 SSDs and 4 HDDs targeted to S2D and other 2 HDDs for system partitions (you plan to use mirrored volumes, for example), they all will be added to S2D pool (except of a system disk, of course, as it’s cannot be pooled).  All physical disks that are part of any pool,including Primordial pool, will not be shown in the disk manager (diskmgmt.msc) if they had been claimed by S2D subsystem. In that case, to make your disk available in the diskmgmt, you need to remove it from pool, rebuild virtual disks (if existed) and unclaim it from S2D. Use the steps below to get your disk back from pool:

#Get all available disks 

Get-PhysicalDisk|ft FriendlyName,SerialNumber,CanPool

#Variable for the disk that you want to remove from $pool

$disk=Get-PhysicalDisk -SerialNumber disk_serial_number
$pool=Get-StoragePool S2D*

#Set disk usage to Retired

$disk|Set-PhysicalDisk -Usage Retired

#Repair Virtual Volumes in the pool

Get-VirtualDisk | ft -AutoSize
Repair-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName "vdisk_name"
Get-StorageJob

#Remove the disk from the pool.
#The disk will be added to the Primordial pool
#...but not be shown in the diskmgmt

Remove-PhysicalDisk $disk -StoragePool $pool

#Tell S2D cluster to not use the removed disk for pool purposes
#....make disk available in the diskmgmt

Set-ClusterS2DDisk -CanBeClaimed 0 -PhysicalDiskIds disk_id

#Optimize pool
Get-StoragePool $pool|Optimize-StoragePool

s2d disk claim

If you removed disk improperly from the pool, you might have the following status for the disk:

{Removing from Pool, Unrecognized Metadata)

Try to reset the physical disk and then disk will be shown in the diskmgmt as well.

Get-PhysicalDisk | ? OperationalStatus -eq "Unrecognized Metadata"|Reset-PhysicalDisk

s2d disk claim_2

P.S. if you add a new server to the S2D, its drives will be automatically added to the pool by default. You can change this behavior by setting AutoPool setting to False.

Get-StorageSubSystem Clu* | Set-StorageHealthSetting -Name “System.Storage.PhysicalDisk.AutoPool.Enabled” -Value False

s2d disk claim_3