Session: BRK3487
Note: This session was jam packed with slides, text, and diagrams. The speaker was also flying through the material, so it was impossible to attempt to keep up. The session was very good, and quite technical. So if you deal with clustering in your daily job, check out the session recording for a boatload of good info.
- Stretch clusters can achieve low RPO and RTO
- Disaster avoidance is the new trend
- Considerations when stretching clusters: Networking, storage
Recommendations: Adjust intra-node heartbeat thresholds; understand
Cloud Witness in Windows Server 2016
- Leverages Azure as arbitration point
- Quorum configuration achieved without an extra site
- Writes a single blob per cluster
- Costs on Azure is extremely low…in terms of pennies
- Newly recommended quorum option
Storage Considerations
- Storage replica is a brand new feature in WS2016
- Block-level, volume-based synchronous & async using SMB 3.1.1
- Any Windows volume, any fixed disk storage, any storage fabric
- Baked into Windows..no need for third party storage
Hyper-V and General use file server are the main use cases for the tech preview. Not for SoFS.
Requirements & Recommendations
- Datacenter edition & Azure stack SKUs only
- Requires Active Directory (no schema updates, just Kerberos)
- >1Gb network between servers
- Disks: Must be GPT not MBR.
- Free space on logs on NTFS/ReFS volume
- Disk physical sector sizes must be the same (e.g. can’t mix 512e & 4K)
- Network latency: 5ms round trip
- Reality: 30-50Km apart
- Network bandwidth is based on IO of the app and IOPS
- Log volumes recommended on Flash (SSD, NVMe, etc.)
- These are *strong* recommendations
- Supports running inside a VM
