VNX and SMB 3

Edwin,

thanks for your answer

Daniel,  the Server manager is for Easy Day toi Day Tasks and tries to ban the Use of Commands.

As ed Mentioned, Data is written Directly to Disk and Special App Informations are stored.

You can also Create the share with Powershell:

New-SmbShare -ContinuouslyAvailable

and check for ca flag with

Get-SmbShare | fl Name,ContinuouslyAvail

Name                  : NETLOGON

ContinuouslyAvailable : False

Name                  : sayno2azureDAG.sayno2azure.local

ContinuouslyAvailable : True

You can change the ca Flag with get-smbshare | Set-SmbShare -ContinuouslyAvailable $True

Multicahnnel however is relatet to TCP Connections Between Client and Server. For each Dedicated TCP ( IP ) Connection between server and CLient, you will get extra Banwith

The smbshare PS Module  has some Powershell CMDlets for Multichannel

PS C:\Users\Administrator> get-command -noun *multichan*

CommandType     Name                                               ModuleName

-----------     ----                                               ----------

Function        Get-SmbMultichannelConnection                      SmbShare

Function        Get-SmbMultichannelConstraint                      SmbShare

Function        New-SmbMultichannelConstraint                      SmbShare

Function        Remove-SmbMultichannelConstraint                   SmbShare

Function        Update-SmbMultichannelConnection                   SmbShare

Karsten

so in that case on VNX you also have to enable CA on File System.

by using server_export with flag type=CA.

It's not enable by default, maybe it change on VNX2 but I don't think

Regards

That's correct, it's not enabled by default on VNX2.

I think it depends on the use case.  SOFS is not intended for applications like home directories (see here for more information http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=12786 ).

So this leaves you with Hyper-V and SQL Server as use cases.  In which case, why not use the block devices directly?

Hi Guys,

On this topic of scale-out file server (SMB3 share) for application, does out VPLEX-Metro supports running the SQL 2012 on native SMB3 shares on CSV, presented as block storage to a Windows 2012 R2 server? I presume this will be supported just like running the HyperV on CSV across VPLEX-Metro but wanted to be sure there will not be any gotcha that I might not be aware of... Thanks.

Excellent! I would refer to this paper along the call that we had some time ago with Robert Wagner where he described the paper. The recording is here , and the slides are here .

Edwin is right – you can deploy SOFS on CSV on a VPLEX dvol. I wouldn’t necessarily do it, though.

I guess one of the primary reason for the use of SOFS is the capability for transparent failover with zero client downtime due to the re-routing done by SMB witness when there is a node outage. In other word, the client operation goes uninterrupted even after a "failover" with no connection drops albeit at a higher storage latency for the apps.

You are correct Edwin. But you can run SQL on normal clustered disks. So I’m having difficulty understanding what would motivate a person to put the SOFS layer in for HyperV and SQL. It adds complexity and cost, and reduces availability.

Hi Paul,

I understand the use case with SOFS but the sales team would like to achieve active-active SQL 2012 DB at the backend for Documentum. So, they are asking if VPLEX-METRO supports running SOFS with SQL 2012 sitting on top for active-active operations supporting Documentum. We know that SOFS is really not suitable for home directories (large number of small file size with metadata) type of workloads. The objective is to have uninterrupted operation for the Documentum System without the need for any VM live migration or failover.

Paul,

you cannot natively install SQL server databases on CSV disk, you can in simple (clustered-) disk.

ah Paul, you edited your post...

kmgan,

So we are talking about two things here, as I see it:

Option 1 (run two clusters)

Cluster1: CSV clustered disk hosting the Scale Out Fileserver for Applications -- on VPLEX

Cluster2: (no disk) SQL server using SMB3 shares from Cluster1

Option 2 (run one cluster)

Cluster1: non-CSV clustered disk, running SQL server -- on VPLEX

For the question "can you run a Scale Out Fileserver on CSV cluster running on VPLEX"

yes; the "load of the CSV" does not change the storage requirements in regards to supportability on VPLEX (compared to Hyper-V). As VPLEX supports CSV for Hyper-V, it supports CSV for Scale Out Fileserver for Applications.

HTH,

Edwin.

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it's possible, but the amount of noise across the VPLEX links as the SMB servers would be actively updating sections of the same VHDXs, in the same block areas as part of active/active and CA could be signiifcant.