@alboup said in Erasure Coding:

Hi all,

Erasure coding - is it a safe for use in production on an all-flash array? I'm specifically talking about VMware's vSAN here, however the question is fairly broad.

The alternative is one I'm most familiar and comfortable with; RAID1(/10) mirrored to another node(s) to provide simple/reliable fault tolerance. However, there are plenty of people talking up the new RAID5/RAID6 erasure coding features as it substantially reduces overheads. Apparently there is far less risk of failure due to the much lower URE rates in flash storage.

I'm curious what you guys think? Is it risk adverse? @scottalanmiller has posted up some passionate threads in the past about why R5/R6 is the devil (which I totally agree with) so where do you stand with erasure coding?

Thanks

1. VMware VSAN has software RAID5 and RAID6, these are XOR-based software parity RAID, I don't know why VMware decided to call them "erasure coding" (typically it's something like Reed-Solomon codes or whatever). Probably they decided "parity RAID" isn't cool and "erasure coding" is cool.

https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.virtualsan.doc%2FGUID-AD408FA8-5898-4541-9F82-FE72E6CD6227.html

2. Microsoft erasure coding is indeed one coming from Azure and while it's OK it's a speed freak because it uses GLOBAL parity, means some regions will be updated more frequently compared to other ones. FTL will take care o that but their E/C was never designed to run with flash for sure!

https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc12/technical-sessions/presentation/huang

Verdict: you can use whatever you want in production, both solutions have many-many adopters but none of them wasn't;t designed to run on flash (think about Pure engine) just because in such a case erasure coding should be done within FTL (flash translation layer) on so-called OpenSSDs (or their equivalent, whatever Pure is calling them).

http://openssd-project.org

Hope this helped

@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:

Side note, how do you calculate cores for Server 2016 on a Scale system. Is it per node?

because I specifically spec'd that Xbyte system with 2x 8core procs because of Windows licensing

It's per-core from Microsoft. Scale can't do anything to change MSFT licensing policy.

@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:

I don't get how they run their sales with all the pricing published on-line

P.S. People should love this approach! Not sure about back-end VCs.

@scottalanmiller said:

If you write a check for more Kangaroo$ than there is in your account, your check will bounce!

If you pay with Kangaroo$ your check bounces either way LOL

@Tim_G said in Accelerate your backups with StarWind Virtual Tape Library and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager:

@Oksana

I've been working on this now, actually

Mind sharing YOUR feedback / results so far?

Meanwhile StarWind VTL ...

StarWind VTL

... is going to have a major feature update announced on VeeamOn 2017 in New Orleans

@hubtechagain said:

WTF is starwind?! ha

This is who we are

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free

We give away free version to use on a bare metal servers (so you take a pair of them and turn into HA NFS or SMB3 NAS). This one has no restrictions at all (capacity is unlimited, production use is OK and you can be anybody to get it).

HA iSCSI and hyper converged versions are available to different set of people like MVPs, SpiceHeads, VCPs, some restricted ones to MCTs & bloggers. Technically we can bring same program to MangoLassi community as well. I just need some sort of a low watermark (points, rank or whatever) to make the program look a bit of private so my VP of Sales would not burn me with a blow torch

Cheers and let me know if you'd have any questions

@scottalanmiller said in Potty Plotter:

What a cool idea. You could get places to compete for ratings or something, too. Bucees in Texas makes big claims to the best restrooms in the world. Time for them to be put the test!

...and start collecting sponsors' checks as well! What a brilliant idea guy has (honestly)!

@Tim_G said in Accelerate your backups with StarWind Virtual Tape Library and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager:

@KOOLER said in Accelerate your backups with StarWind Virtual Tape Library and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager:

@Tim_G said in Accelerate your backups with StarWind Virtual Tape Library and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager:

@Oksana

I've been working on this now, actually

Mind sharing YOUR feedback / results so far?

Meanwhile StarWind VTL ...

StarWind VTL

... is going to have a major feature update announced on VeeamOn 2017 in New Orleans

So far it's going well. I've pretty much set it up in the same way as in the guide Charbel Nemnom made: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/technical_papers/virtual-tape-library-used-with-microsoft-system-center-data-protection-manager-2016.pdf

The performance is good and backup is fast. My test was with 8 LTO5 virtual tapes using 4 virtual slots. I limited the tapes to 250 GB each for testing certain things.

I also want to try having the virtual tape files living on a volume that is deduplicated. I haven't found anything that says whether or not it will work well with the StarWind VTL, or how efficient it will be... so I'm just going to try it and see what happens!

StarWind has own dedupe but it's inline and implemented to handle streaming writes for primary storage. For backup target it's absolutely OK to use Windows Server built-in dedupe. Veeam has own but it's not that good on the multiple images.

P.S. Yes, when we'll re-publish VTL as a Linux VSA (soon) we'll have dedupe issues - there's no good dedupe in Linux standard distros so far...

@anonymous said:

What options do I have? Just a simply 2 host setup. No SAN.

Like @SAM mentioned StarWind two-node setup is free. You can use Hyper-V as a basic OS inside VM to make it 200% free.

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free

For hyper converged offering please kick me PM as we're working on a special offering for MangoLassi people.

Xfce on all the systems I use (opensuse, freebsd & netbsd)

@StrongBad said in For MangoLassi.it Forum Geeks: StarWind Virtual SAN NFR (not-for-resale) License!:

@dafyre said in For MangoLassi.it Forum Geeks: StarWind Virtual SAN NFR (not-for-resale) License!:

Only if setting it up to connect via iSCSI.

Isn't that what it uses?

Also NFS, SMB3 and iSER + vVols (very soon).

@scottalanmiller said:

They were posting on here seconds ago. But any "deploy without hypervisor" means, by definition, it is SAN, not VSAN. That's not something they determine, it just is what it is.

200% correct !!

@tim_g said in Microsoft Removes Storage Spaces Direct from Windows Server 2016:

You can still deploy systems with S2D by using RS1, and is still supported as in LTS.

It looks like they will be adding S2D back in, though. Just not yet (until it's production ready?).

You can't upgrade anyways, so if you don't already use S2D, it doesn't effect you. If you want to use S2D, you can still deploy systems with S2D by using Server 2016 LTS (RS1), and is still supported.

> It looks like they are moving S2D to a different product/SKU from what the comments say... It's hard to know what they are up to without being in their circle like @KOOLER is.

You have any info you're allowed to share regarding this to clear things up?

Unfortunately I won't be a valuable source of information here - I don't know about their plans

@creayt said:

Have a new laptop coming and I'd like to run something like Time Machine for OS X where I can just restall the whole system from it if possible. Any suggestions?

Veeam or wrong! (c) ...

https://www.veeam.com/endpoint-backup-free.html?ad=menu-products

@Dashrender said:

I'm definitely interested in trying out StarWinds vSAN, but I don't currently have anything to use it on.

VM-based stand is OK. also we're in Azure Marketplace so you can play with StarWind using free $200 Microsoft Azure trial hardware-less.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/starwind/starwindvirtualsan/

Hope this helped

Does anybody know any free Hyper-V managers except SCVMM and 5nine stuff? Open source?

@wirestyle22 said in Azure Outage... Again:

@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:

The loss of knowledge of concrete was such a big deal that until the mid 1700s, we had gone over a thousand years without any idea of how concrete was made. So Rome was making concrete builds for hundreds of years longer than we've known about concrete in modern times.

That means that for well over a millennium... humans had to look upon the structures of the Roman Empire and say... that's so neat, what the heck is that material that they used?

It's interesting what history lost. Archimedes made steam engines 2000 years before we figured it out as well but it was useless at the time because slave labor was so cheap.

The only reason why some empires f.e. Russia did exist so long (and keeps existing BTW).

@travisdh1 said in Server and Storage Redundancy:

@DustinB3403 said in Server and Storage Redundancy:

Scott you had a conversation with your self...

I do that all the time. It doesn't get really confusing till me, myself, and I are all talking at the same time

That's how Ethernet (original one) was invented ;))

@scottalanmiller said in Hp storage D2d4324 nfs slow xenserver:

For XenServer, which has high availability shared storage built in out of the box, you literally need nothing. HA-Lizard is a script that sets things up for you. You can use Starwind for larger scale. HP VSA will work as well. You can use Gluster or CEPH, too.

+++

Also it's a very common misconception in a hyperconverged scenario ALL the nodes should participate in the storage providing. It's not! There may be storage only nodes, compute only and hybrid. In a very different configurations. Pretty much all the HCI vendors can do that, especially if they support common uplinks (NFS, SMB3 etc).

thwr thanks for reference!

Mike, yes, we can do that just fine! it's still recommended to do Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape however because direct iSCSI access for tape can be slow and backups may not fit into backup window. if it's a case VTL is your best friend

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-tape-library

Ping me if you'd have any questions so I could help.