Solved Port - Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) needed only on HBA?
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Hi,
I am researching compatible hardware for the build of a new Hyper-V + S2D Cluster. Datacenter Windows Licenses are free for us. I know of the alternatives (Starwind, etc.). Scenario: I have read that certain servers are incompatible with S2D (older Dell and HP machines), because Fault Domains cannot be detected correctly on the enclosure level. The forum seemed to suggest that missing support of SES was the culprit.What I read makes little sense to me, as I plan to only use disks directly slotted into the servers (no attached JBODs). As Windows Failover Clustering is able to be set to node-level fault domains (in this case one single server is one fault domain), I don't see any reason why SES would be needed (disks are simply mapped to the node's fault domain).
The official Microsoft hardware requirements for S2D explicitly state that SES is needed for the hard drives under the section "HBA". It is not clear to me if SES support is explicitly needed for the internal disk backplane as well. As for the HBA, I will simply buy a controller with the same chip used by the certified Supermicro solution, no problem there (it's a simple SAS HBA anyway).
What is worse is that every officially supported solution I found from Dell (R730xd) and Supermicro (SYS-1028U-S2D for example) do not mention SES in their data sheets, so I am totally not sure what to believe. The officially supported solutions are not ideal for us, unfortunately, as I would like to use 3.5" disks.
Question: Maybe the integrated disk enclosure is not the problem, but the SAS controller built into the incompatible servers. Is this correct? Does anybody know if SES is explicitly needed for the server disk backplane?
I have to add: there are of course solutions from Dell and Supermicro using 3.5" disks. The pricing for Dell R730xd is out of my league and the Supermicro cluster-in-a-box solution offers few HDD slots per host.
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What's providing the RAID? S2D or RAID hardware?
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Paging @scottalanmiller @Tim_G @JaredBusch
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RAID would be provided by SS.
He would need a controller that is pass-through.
Technically S2D is designed to be used by DAS systems (or JBODs if you like to make Scott facepalm), and not internal server storage... even though it works just fine.
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@tim_g said in Port - Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) needed only on HBA?:
Technically S2D is designed to be used by DAS systems (or JBODs if you like to make Scott facepalm), and not internal server storage... even though it works just fine.
Right - so I was confused by the posters lack of whatever about JBODs - Assuming S2D is managing the whole thing, then S2D would see the JBODs.
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For production usage, here's where I would be looking first: https://www.windowsservercatalog.com/results.aspx?&bCatID=1642&cpID=0&avc=10&ava=0&avt=0&avq=0&OR=1&PGS=25
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If you are looking for supported Dell HBAs: https://www.windowsservercatalog.com/results.aspx?&bCatID=1643&cpID=22225&avc=10&ava=0&avt=0&avq=0&OR=1&PGS=25
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@dustinb3403 said in Port - Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) needed only on HBA?:
What is worse is that every officially supported solution I found from Dell (R730xd) and Supermicro (SYS-1028U-S2D for example) do not mention SES in their data sheets, so I am totally not sure what to believe. The officially supported solutions are not ideal for us, unfortunately, as I would like to use 3.5" disks.
There are a lot of supported Dell and Supermicro enclosure solutions:
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@tim_g said in Port - Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) needed only on HBA?:
RAID would be provided by SS.
He would need a controller that is pass-through.
Technically S2D is designed to be used by DAS systems (or JBODs if you like to make Scott facepalm), and not internal server storage... even though it works just fine.
There's no problem to use RAID controller instead of a basic HBA as long as you a) patch the registry (see my link below) or use special "filter" driver to report "RAID" bus (sic!) as SATA or SAS, and b) disable write-back cache on BOTH controller and disk itself, so all writes become atomic.
P.S. It's a BAD idea to use anything like that in production because as long as Microsoft support will discover your S2D configuration isn't supported they will pull out and walk away with a grin face.
