3. With Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision, customers can…
1Consistent
Platform
Windows Azure Pack
Service ProvidersPrivate Cloud
Public Cloud
DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT IDENTITY VIRTUALIZATIONDATA
Azure Virtual Machines
Windows Azure Pack
6. About PowerONPlatforms
• Formed from a collection of Industry
Veterans
• Literally written the book on System
Center
• IT Management & Cloud
Automation Specialist
• Business Led not Technology Led
7. Focus Capabilities
Digital Datacenter
Alignment of IT Roadmap to Business Requirements – Function vs. Need
Enterprise Device Management Unified Data Protection
Automated Deployment Solutions from Appliances to Deployment Toolkits
Enablement Support to continually support clients local teams to achieve maximum value
14. Clustered
Demystifying Storage Appliances (NAS/SAN)
What’s in a storage appliance?
x86/x64 Processors
Memory
Network Adapters
Storage HBAs
Sound familiar?
Let’s peel back the layers…
“Back”
“Front”
Deploy two or more for a Scale Out Continuously
Available Solution
SAS
Ethernet: 1Gb/10Gb
FC: 1/2/4/8/16 Gb
15. Clustered
Windows Server 2012 R2 File Server & Spaces
Windows Server 2012 Spaces
Windows Server 2012 File Server
Deploy two or more for a Scale Out CA Solution
SAS
SMB3/Ethernet: 1Gb/10Gb
40Gb/56 Gb RDMA
16. Familiar Enterprise-Grade Capabilities
• Storage Tiering
• Data deduplication
• RAID resiliency groups
• Pooling of disks
• High availability
• Persistent write-back cache
• Copy offload
• Snapshots
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Traditional Storage
with FC/iSCSI Storage Array
Windows File Server Cluster
with Storage Spaces
17. Hard Disk Drives
Hot data
Cold data
Solid State Drives
Storage Spaces
Storage tiering
• Inbox storage virtualization
solution with automatic tiering
• Improved storage cost-
performance with
industry-standard hardware
• Use solid-state drives (SSD) and
hard-disk drives (HDD) in tiered
storage space
• Can “pin” high priority files
to the SSD tier
Storage Spaces – Storage Tiering
18. Storage Spaces – Storage Tiering
• Optimized Data Placement
• Pool consists of both SSDs and HDDs
• Tiers within a Storage Space
• Hot Data (SSDs), Cold Data (HDDs)
• Sub-File-Level Data Movement
• Complements write-back caching
• Administrative Controlled Pinning
• Pin hot files to faster SSD tier
• Example: VDI Pooled VM’s VHD
Tiered Storage Spaces
provides persistent
performance
improvement for hot
data
The best of both worlds:
SSD Performance &
HDD Capacity
Cold DataHot Data
19. Storage Spaces - Write-Back Cache
• Random Disk Access
• Inherent to storage access patterns with virtualized
deployments
• SSDs provide higher IOPs for random access
• Improved performance for
real-world workloads
• SSDs absorb random writes at high IOPS levels
• Seamless integration and familiar management
Windows Server 2012 R2 maximizes
performance and capacity
The Spaces Write-Back Cache absorbs
spikes in random write activity
Cold DataHot Data
20.
21. Reduced Mean Time To Recovery
• Mirror Spaces Rebuild
• Parallelized Recovery
• Increased Throughput
• Optimized Disk Utilization
• Utilization of spare capacity
• Hot Spare no longer necessary in R2
Performance improvements to
radically reduce MTTR
Rebuild Metric Measurement
Data Rebuilt 2,400 GB
Time Taken 49 min
Rebuild Throughput > 800 MB/s
3TB HDDs, 2-way, 4-column Mirror Space
Source: Internal Microsoft Testing, No Foreground Activity
22. Primary application data storage on cost effective,
continuously available, high performance
SMB3 file Shares backed by Tiered Storage Spaces
1. Performance, Scale: SMB3 File Storage network
2. Continuous Availability and Seamless Scale Out with File
Server Nodes
3. Elastic, Reliable, Optimized Tiered Storage Spaces
4. Standard volume hardware for low cost
Storage Spaces
Hyper-V Clusters
SMB3 Storage Network Fabric
Shared JBOD
Storage
1
4
22
3
Scale-Out File Server
Clusters
Windows Server 2012 R2 SDS deployment
JBOD = Just a Bunch of Drives
23. System Center
Windows
Server
SMI-S Storage
Service
Block storage
provisioning
File storage
provisioning
Hyper-V
Storage
Management
SAN based
Rapid
Provisioning
SM API
Integration
Storage
Utilization
Trending
PowerShell
Support
Thin LUN
provisioning
Thin Provision
Alert Monitor
SAS Array
Support
Management
Private Cloud Software Defined Storage platform
Dedup
Tiering for
efficient use
of SSDs
Storage Spaces
NTFS with
fast chkdskFlexible, Elastic, Efficient
Tiered Storage pools
SMB3 Direct
for low latency
SMB3
Multichannel
for FT, Perf
SMB3 for
Windows
clients
SMB3
Transparent
Failover
iSCSI Target
block
storage
NFS 3, 4.1 for
*nix clients,
VMware
CSV Scale
Out
Multi protocol data access
SMB3 SoFS for Hyper-V, SQL Server
Low latency,
Continuously
available,
Fault Tolerant
Scale Out
storage for
Hyper-V
Windows Server 2012 R2 SDS stack
VMware
24. Remote File Storage for Server Applications
New scenario in Windows Server 2012
Server apps storing data files on file shares
Examples:
Hyper-V VHD, configuration files, snapshots etc.
SQL Server database and log files
IIS content and configuration files
Benefits:
Easy provisioning and management
Share management instead of LUNs and zoning
Flexibility
Dynamically relocate server in datacenter without needing to
reconfigure network or storage access
Leverage network investments
Specialized storage networking infrastructure or knowledge is
not required
Lower CapEx and OpEx
File Server File Server
Shared
Storage
Hyper-V Server
App
Server
Web
Server
DB
Server SQL Server IIS
25. Clustered File Server
Scale-Out File Server for Application Data
New clustered file server
Targeted for server app storage
Key capabilities*:
Dynamic scaling w. active-active file shares
Fault tolerance with zero downtime
Fast failure recovery
Clustered Shared Volume cache
CHKDSK with zero downtime
Application consistent snapshots
Support for RDMA enabled networks
Simpler management
Requirements
Windows Failover Cluster with Clustered Shared
Volumes
Both application server and file server cluster must be
running Windows Server 2012
Application Servers
Single File System Namespace
Cluster Shared Volumes
Single Logical File Server (fsshare)
Data Center Network
(Ethernet, InfiniBand or combination)
27. Storage challenges
Storage Today = Complex & Expensive
* Source:
EMC
Digital
Universe
with
Research
and
Analysis
by IDC,
Storage cost and
infrastructure
sprawl
Complex data
protection &
recovery
Resource
constraints
Rapid data growth - 40% YoY*
* Source: EMC Digital Universe with Research and Analysis by IDC, 2014
28. Microsoft has a unique solution
Applications in Physical or Virtual Servers
StorSimple Hybrid Storage Array
Enterprise SAN storage
Inline de-dupe,
compression &
automatic tiering
Automated offsite data
protection using cloud
snapshots
Highly efficient, location
independent disaster
recovery
Consolidated storage
and data management
Access in Azure to
enterprise data with
StorSimple Virtual
Appliance
StorSimple connects Windows, Linux and VMware servers to Azure Storage in minutes
with no application modification
SVA
On-premises
datacentre
Public Cloud
Infrastructure
29. How customers benefit
Primary Storage
Archival Storage
Disk-based Backup
Remote Replication
Tape backup and DR
Storage Today Microsoft Azure StorSimple
Manage
data growth
Lower storage
costs
Simplify data
protection and
disaster recovery
Increase business
agility
Reduce storage costs by 40-60%
StorSimple
30. Application and workload focus
* Only available with StorSimple 8000 series
Cloud
Apps*
Virtual
Machines
SharePointFileshares Archives SQL Server*
Azure
workloads
On-premises
workloads
DR* Dev/
test*
31. Simplify offsite data protection
Microsoft Azure
Production Data Production Data
Cloud Snapshots
Datacenter-1 Datacenter-2
Periodic VSS consistent cloud snapshots
of production data
Location independent recovery from
cloud snapshot
StorSimple
Virtual
Appliance
32. Increase IT agility to meet business priorities
No need for incessant planning and
worrying about running out of capacity for
primary storage and compliance data
On-demand storage
No need to manage separate data protection
solutions or be on-site. Up to the minute
status and consistent control in all sites
Consolidated management
No need to setup or maintain on-premises
equipment for new or special projects, since
enterprise data can be accessed in the cloud
On demand infrastructure
34. Storage In Review
ReducingCosts
Performance
Scalability
Manageability
Reliability
• Improved IOPS performance with Write-Back Cache support
• Improved hot data performance through storage tiering using SSDs and HDDs
in the same storage space
• 50% performance improvement for small IO in SMB Direct
• Hyper-V hosts automatically directed to the “best” file server node avoids
unnecessary redirection traffic
• CSV volumes are automatically distributed across the cluster
• Hyper-V Live Migration using SMB3
• Improved MTTR from drive failures through parallel rebuild
• Resilient to dual-drive failures in parity spaces
• SMB instances dedicated for CSV traffic
• Grow or shrink a virtual disk (VHDX) with no downtime
• Hyper-V Storage Quality of Service (QoS)
• Enhanced SM-API for remote management of scale-out file servers with storage spaces
and improved performance
• Data deduplication of VDI storage on Scale-Out File Servers
• Tenant clustering without requiring Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage
Scale-OutFile Server Clusters
StorageSpaces Virtualizationand Resiliency
Hyper-V/SQL/IIS Clusters
SMB
Shared JBOD
Storage
37. Next Actions
• Complete quick survey (if haven’t already)
• Follow up call with Microsoft
• Bespoke Business & Technical Proposal from Microsoft
• Experience session at Microsoft with PowerOn Platforms
• www.poweronplatforms.com
Microsoft to introduce topic/ PowerOn Platform as partner of choice – to then handover.
Today, the world has become a giant network. People are hyper connected more than ever before and Azure is Hyper-Scale to cope with that demand.
The Cloud OS has 3 legs
Starts Private Cloud: Windows Server & System Center come hand in hand. Rarely do we talk WS without SC, you will never realise the full capability of hybrid cloud performance without it.
Then the Public Cloud - Azure, if to be described in a single word: Scale - it's Planet Wide Services. 3 co's globally delivering at that scale AWS/ Google/ Microsoft. None of which use VMware, only one of which shares their hypervisor with everyone.
We also have Service Providers, tens of thousands globally for times when you say I want a specific service on a specific rack, we can't give you that – we are Hyper-scale when we add servers we add containers of 1000’s. That is where our Cloud OS service providers come in, they can give you that.
Previously you may have discussed how you might scale up your infrastructure – with advances in Software Defined Compute/ Networking & Storage we now have conversations of scaling out and back in.
This is the full scope of what IT needs to handle today.
We talk a lot about the basic issues of managing capacity and application delivery, but there is a lot more that IT needs to worry about such as storage, firewalls, security, heating, cooling, remote access, and so on.
So when you think about moving to the cloud, you have to look at how adding in cloud resources is going to make this picture better—how you can extend beyond the walls of your datacenter without creating more complexity to manage. And you also want to think specifically about a platform that allows for management of heterogeneous environments. You have to find a way to get flexibility out of the existing systems.
Microsoft has been introducing several new storage features with Windows Server 2012, and is further expanding the range of capabilities and benefits with Windows Server 2012 R2. These innovative features and capabilities extend functionality in profound ways, including the ability to leverage inexpensive storage to create highly available, robust, and high performing storage solutions. These new Microsoft storage capabilities add dynamic functionality on each server and can work together to further enhance functionality at scale in large enterprise environments.
IT demands: Less expensive, enterprise-class storage solution:
Enterprise class performance and scale have traditionally been associated with high-end storage solutions. But not everyone can afford an expensive SAN – most customers are looking at options that gives them the same kind of reliability, resiliency and availability that high-end solutions offers but at the cost of industry-standard hardware.
WS12R2 delivers: High-performance, reliable storage on industry-standard hardware:
Leveraging industry-standard hardware as opposed to costly purpose-built storage devices or converged infrastructure hardware, Windows Server 2012 R2 is a cost-effective way of pursuing IT demands for high-performance and highly available storage: By adding new storage options, new file server scenarios and new features that help preserve uptime, the use of industry-standard hardware can help drive cost efficiency dramatically. Among other things, new features and updates in Windows Server 2012 R2 include:
Storage Spaces with tiering:
See separate slide
SMB Direct (RDMA):
Since Windows Server 2012, the SMB protocol includes support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network adapters, which allows storage performance capabilities that rival Fiber Channel. RDMA network adapters enable this performance capability by operating at full speed with very low latency due to the ability to bypass the kernel and perform write and read operations directly to and from memory. This capability is possible since reliable transport protocols are implemented on the adapter hardware and allow for zero-copy networking with kernel bypass. With this capability, applications, including SMB, can perform data transfers directly from memory, through the adapter, to the network, and then to the memory of the application requesting data from the file share.
Data deduplication
Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX)
Native NVMe support
IT demands: Guaranteed high levels of Service Level Agreement (SLA):
Hardware fails, hardware needs to be replaced as they are close to their EOL, software requires patches and operating systems have to be updated and most organizations are used to this cycle. What doesn’t change is the SLA they have with their internal and external customers. Application owners still require uninterrupted access to their resources or services that you, as an enterprise or cloud datacenter administrator are providing them.
WS12R2 delivers: Continuous application availability:
Windows Server 2012 R2 reduces server downtime and application disruption by letting you store server application data on file shares and obtain a similar level of reliability, availability, manageability, and high performance that would typically be expected from a high-end Storage Area Network (SAN). Among other things, new features and updates in Windows Server 2012 R2 include:
SMB Transparent Failover:
Introduces in Windows Server 2012, SMB Transparent Failover allows you to transparently move SMB file shares between the file server cluster nodes, without interruption of service for the SMB client. This is useful for planned events (for example, when you need to perform maintenance on a node) or surprise events (for example, when a hardware failure causes a node to fail). This is achieved regardless of the kind of operation that was underway when the failure occurred.
SMB Multichannel
Per-share SMB Scale-out:
One the main advantages of file storage over block storage is the ease of configuration, paired with the ability to configure folders that can be shared by multiple clients. SMB takes this one step further by introducing the SMB Scale-Out feature, which provides the ability to share the same folders from multiple nodes of the same cluster. This is made possible by the use of Cluster Shared Volume (CSV), which since Windows Server 2012 supports file sharing. For example, if you have a four-node file server cluster using SMB Scale-Out, an SMB client will be able to access the share from any of the four nodes. This active-active configuration lets you balance the load across cluster nodes by allowing an administrator to move clients without any service interruption. The following enhancements are new in Windows Server 2012 R2: Instead of per file server, SMB sessions can now also be managed per share. Scale-Out File Server clients are automatically redirected to best node with the nest storage connectivity, minimizing redirection traffic. Also, new in Windows Server 2012 R2, SMB Scale-out offers finer-grained load distribution by distributing workloads from a single client across many nodes of a scale-out file server.
- Cluster-aware Updating
Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager:
see separate slide
IT demands: Efficient management of storage resources:
Whether customers use high-end storage solutions or industry standard solutions, efficiency of the use and management of valuable storage resources is critical. Not surprisingly, therefore, one of the most important focal areas is around managing the storage infrastructure both from a capacity and availability perspective. Customers are looking for efficient management and backup options that would let them manage their diverse infrastructure and have the ability to automate some of their mundane tasks.
WS12R2 delivers: Comprehensive storage management and backup:
Windows Server 2012 R2 provide great management and backup capabilities that help you better manage your storage capacity whether you have a single server or multiple servers, whether you have one class of storage or a variety of storage solutions, and whether you have a Windows only or a heterogeneous environment. Among other things, new features and updates in Windows Server 2012 R2 include:
Online VHDX resize:
Online VHDX resize allows for greater storage flexibility by allowing a virtual SCSI disk to either grow or shrink the VHDX file whilst attached to a running virtual machine. Thus the volume within the guest can be dynamically either expanded or reduced.
Storage QoS:
Storage QoS allows you to restrict disk throughput for overactive/disruptive virtual machines and can be configured dynamically while the virtual machine is running. For maximum bandwidth applications, it provides strict policies to throttle IO to a given VHD/VHDX to a maximum IO threshold. For minimum bandwidth applications, it provides policies for threshold warnings that alert of an IO starved VHD/VHDX when the bandwidth does not meet the minimum threshold.
Unified storage management (SMI-S and WMI):
To help improve storage management efficiency and offset that cost, Windows Server 2012 R2 comes with a set of storage management APIs and provider interfaces that will enable administrators to centrally manage disparate storage resources and solutions, like SANs and storage arrays, from a centralized “single pane of glass” interface. Manageable resources can include SANs that are SMI-S complaint, storage devices with proprietary hardware that has compatible third-party storage management providers, or storage devices that are already being allocated through the use of Storage Spaces. This storage management capability will allow administrators to configure and manage all of the storage devices throughout their organization or management sphere through an easy-to-use management interface that they are already familiar with, the Server Manager. By using Server Manager, administrators can populate server groups with file servers or storage clusters that leverage Storage Spaces, or reach out to populate manageable devices that have SMI-S agents enabled.
SMI-S Provider for iSCSI Target
Improved SMB diagnosability
Windows Azure Backup:
see separate slide
Storage head of modern storage appliance…
Take a storage appliance head and cut it in half logically…
You never buy one, you always buy two for scale out.
All the way up to 8 if you like.
Pull the power cable, on one, no issues, everything just continues to work.
…
Everyone has a storage problem…
Not enough storage, too much data, different types of storage, no way to easily manage it.
We want to solve this. We are driving down the complexity and driving down the cost.
This slide talks about the variety of storage innovation that Microsoft is driving forward with Windows Server 2012 R2 for on-premises as well as cloud-integrated contexts. As their storage needs keep growing, customers have a great opportunity to drive up storage reliability while driving down costs/ complexity.
Storage tiering
Storage tiering is an exciting example of how we’re driving storage cost-performance with industry standard hardware. The key principle here is to use low cost-high capacity spinning disks to store less frequently used data and reserve the high-speed solid state disks to store frequently used data. Storage tiering builds on storage virtualization offered by Storage Spaces by assigning solid state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD) to the same storage pool and using them as different tiers in the same tiered space. Windows Server recognizes the tiers and optimizes them by moving often used “hot” data to the SSD tier. Windows tracks data temperature and moves data at the sub-file level; only “hot” regions of a file (VHD, database, etc.) need to move to SSDs, the “cold” regions can reside on HDDs.
Additional talking points:
Performance improvements in file-based application storage – This will build on the innovation Microsoft delivered in Windows Server 2012 to deliver greater performance in file-based storage for workloads, including SQL Server. As an example, we expect significant IOPS improvements for a few IO classes, including SQL OLTP workloads.
StorSimple cloud-integrated storage and Windows Azure – We will continue to integrate StorSimple from an engineering, marketing and business model standpoint.
Flexible data protection with Windows Azure Backup – Windows Azure Backup integrates with the familiar backup tools in Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 Essentials, and System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager so customers protect important server data offsite with automated backups to Azure, where it is available for easy data restoration. Windows Azure Backup is in public paid preview as of April 2013. As per current POR, we expect this service to be commercially available later this year.
StorSimple as you probably recall, took a different approach to dealing with the costs data growth and the complications of data protection, by leverage cloud storage services that integrate with on-premises storage. Its enterprise SAN storage with redundant everything for high availability, it does inline primary dedupe – something that still surprises a lot of people – as well as data compression to further reduce the cost of storage. Then unlike the other hybrid storage systems out there that tier data across SSDs and HDDs, StorSimple solutions have hybrid cloud tiering, which puts the least active data in the system in the cloud. If you are going to serious about a low cost tier, it really needs to be less than the HDDs in storage systems – and servers too for that matter.
And StorSimple completely automates data protection for all the data stored on it using something called cloud snapshots – which are the same as snapshots in other arrays, but cloud snapshots don’t eat up capacity in the array and you can keep them as long as you want without worrying about capacity shortfalls forcing you to delete data you really aren’t supposed to. It also provides incredibly efficient recovery capabilities that we talk about as thin recovery – because it only recovers the data that applications need – not all the inactive data that nobody wants to think about again.
So this is our core, our baseline that we are building on that our customers appreciate so much
Handover to Microsoft to close out.
Specialist in IT Management and Cloud Automation
Our Offerings
Consulting - We show you the art of the possible, define what is right for your business and the best way to adopt it.
Solutions – Specialist products that deliver full solutions in a very rapid model through deployment automation.
Enablement – Focused on continually supporting our customers internal skills to utilise the full capabilities of the platforms delivered.
Our Ethos
“To find the right fit solution for our customers needs and automating the deployment process to rapidly to deliver a solution that delivers the required capabilities to their business“
Philip Mercer – Solutions & Services Director
Windows Server 2012 introduced IP Address Management (IPAM), a framework for discovering, monitoring, auditing, and managing the physical IP address space and the associated infrastructure servers on a corporate network. Windows Server 2012 R2 adds virtual IP address space management.
IPAM gives you a choice of two main architectures:
Distributed, where an IPAM server is deployed at every site in an enterprise. This mode of deployment is largely preferred to reduce network latency in managing infrastructure servers from a centralized IPAM server.
Centralized, where one IPAM server is deployed in an enterprise. This will be deployed even in case of the distributed mode. This way administrators would have one single console to visualize, monitor, and manage the entire IP address space of the network and also the associated infrastructure servers.
An example of the distributed IPAM deployment method is shown in this figure, with one IPAM server located at the corporate headquarters and others at each branch office. There is no communication or database sharing between different IPAM servers in the enterprise. If multiple IPAM servers are deployed, you can customize the scope of discovery for each IPAM server or filter the list of managed servers. A single IPAM server might manage a specific domain or location, perhaps with a second IPAM server configured as a backup.
IPAM monitoring
IPAM periodically attempts to locate the domain controller, DNS, and DHCP servers on the network that are within the scope of discovery that you specify and allow manual addition of Network Policy Server (NPS). You must choose whether these servers are managed by IPAM or unmanaged. To be managed by IPAM, server security settings and firewall ports must be configured to allow the IPAM server access to perform the required monitoring and configuration functions. You can choose to manually configure these settings or use Group Policy objects (GPOs) to configure them automatically. If you choose the automatic method, settings are applied when a server is marked as managed, and settings are removed when it is marked as unmanaged.
The IPAM server communicates with managed servers by using a remote procedure call (RPC) or WMI interface, as shown here. IPAM monitors domain controllers and servers running NPS for IP address tracking purposes. In addition to monitoring functions, several DHCP server and scope properties can be configured by using IPAM. Zone status monitoring and a limited set of configuration functions are also available for DNS servers.
IPAM supports Active Directory–based auto-discovery of DNS and DHCP servers on the network. Discovery is based on the domains and server roles selected during configuration of the scope of discovery.
IPAM discovers the domain controller, DNS servers, and DHCP servers in the network and confirms their availability based on role-specific protocol transactions. In addition to automatic discovery, IPAM also supports the manual addition of a server to the list of servers in the IPAM system.
Managed servers
Configuring the manageability status of a server as Managed indicates that it is part of the IPAM server’s managed environment. Data is retrieved from managed servers to display in various IPAM views. The type of data that is gathered depends on the server role.
Unmanaged servers
Configuring the manageability status of a server as Unmanaged indicates that the server is considered to be outside the IPAM server’s managed environment. No data is collected by IPAM from these servers.
IPAM data collection tasks
IPAM schedules the following tasks to retrieve data from managed servers to populate the IPAM views for monitoring and management. You can also modify these tasks by using Task Scheduler.
Server Discovery. Automatically discovers domain controllers, DHCP servers, and DNS servers in the domains that you select.
Server Configuration. Collects configuration information from DHCP and DNS servers for display in IP address space and server management functions.
Address Use. Collects IP address space use data from DHCP servers for display of current and historical use.
Event Collection. Collects DHCP and IPAM server operational events. Also collects events from domain controllers, NPS, and DHCP servers for IP address tracking.
Server Availability. Collects service status information from DHCP and DNS servers.
Service Monitoring. Collects DNS zone status events from DNS servers.
Address Expiry. Tracks IP address expiry state and logs notifications.
We want to manage everything through a single pane of glass; VMM.
That is, the vision is we can do bare metal provisioning and management from top to bottom, from the scale out front end clusters to the network and backend disks and storage spaces allowing for provisioning and configuring from VMM.
Goals… We wanted…
Standards based by of providing all aspects of storage
Microsoft Vision for Storage in the cloud
Scout-out (vs Scale Up) Low cost commodity hardware disks, networking, etc.
Using commodity networking, and storage to create resilient solutions for storage.
Ethernet is the low cost scale out layer.
In a hybrid cloud world, customers are looking at their datacenters as datacenters without boundaries – i.e., datacenters that can grow beyond one physical geographic location either into other datacenters they own, datacenters that are part of a service provider cloud or the public cloud with Windows Azure. To enable hybrid clouds for them, they need networking infrastructure that scales to growing demand and changes and that can support workload mobility cross datacenters.
IT demands: Simplified use of network resources in a multitenant, cross-premises environment
To enable multi-tenant IT services and/or hybrid clouds, there is a need to simplify the network complexity involved in migrating virtual machines – from changing IP addresses, modifying applications, changing network ACLs etc.
WS12R2 delivers: Software-defined network infrastructure
Software-defined networking enhances the management of modern networks by providing the ability for applications to control access to network resources dynamically. A key enabler of SDN is that it uses networking functionality that has been moved to the virtual switch, providing the ability to modify packets in transit and enabling integration of more advanced switch extensions. Finally, SDN also brings the benefit of unifying the management of both the physical and virtual infrastructure. Among other things, new features and updates in Windows Server 2012 R2 include:
- Hyper-V Network Virtualization:
With Hyper‑V Network Virtualization in Windows Server 2012 R2, you can isolate network traffic from different business units or customers on a shared infrastructure and not be required to use VLANs. Hyper‑V Network Virtualization also lets you move virtual machines as needed within your virtual infrastructure while preserving their virtual network assignments. Finally, you can even use Hyper‑V Network Virtualization to transparently integrate these private networks into a preexisting infrastructure on another site.
Hyper‑V Network Virtualization extends the concept of server virtualization to allow multiple virtual networks, potentially with overlapping IP addresses, to be deployed on the same physical network. With Hyper‑V Network Virtualization, you can set policies that isolate traffic in your dedicated virtual network independently of the physical infrastructure.
On the same physical network, with Hyper-V Network Virtualization, you can run multiple virtual network infrastructures and you can have overlapping IP addresses with each virtual network infrastructure acting as if it was the only one running on the shared physical network infrastructure.
- Hyper-V Extensible Switch
Multi-tenant site-to-site VPN gateway:
In Windows Server 2012, we introduced a feature called cross-premises connectivity, with provides VPN site-to-site functionality (within the remote access role) to help establish cross-premises connectivity between enterprises and hosting service providers. Cross-premises connectivity enables enterprises to connect to private subnets in a hosted cloud network. It also enables connectivity between geographically separate enterprise locations. However, some of the limitations of this feature were that you needed one gateway per tenant (two for HA), you could only do host-level clustering, there were limited routing capabilities and a lack of Internet NAT.
Consider the situation where a hoster needs to be able to connect customers to their own resources provisioned within the hoster's cloud environment. In Windows Server 2012, the hoster would have to provide a separate server to server (S2S) virtual private networking (VPN) virtual machine for each customer or implement a third-party multi-tenant VPN gateway. Now with Windows Server 2012 R2, you no longer require a separate third-party multi-tenant VPN gateway, as this feature is now built in to the operating system. This function can provide a seamless connection over a S2S VPN link between multiple external organizations and the resources that those organizations own in a hosted cloud. It also enables connectivity between physical and virtual networks, enterprise data centers, and hosting organizations, and between enterprise networks and Windows Azure. High availability is provided through guest clustering using a hot standby node available. A dynamic link library ensures any routing configuration is synced from the active node to the hot standby, and when the standby becomes active, the routing configuration is applied. To ensure that routes are updated dynamically, Windows Server 2012 R2 implements Border Gateway Protocol and incorporates multitenant-aware Network Address Translation (NAT) for Internet access.
- Standards-based switch configuration:
Today’s datacenters are made up of different classes of devices – e.g. load balancers, power distribution units, baseboard management controllers (BMCs), top-of-rack (TOR) switches, routers, etc. - from a variety of device manufacturers. With the explosion of datacenters the need to automate management of such devices in a consistent way is more important than ever. Since most of these devices are managed via different protocols and schemas, and in some instances, proprietary solutions, customers are asking for a consistent developer abstraction layer for interacting with the wide array of devices & vendors, similar to the Hardware Abstraction Layer that Windows provides to application developers.
One of the core innovations of Windows Server 2012 was Standards Based Management. As part of this effort, a significant amount of work was done in the management stack of Windows Server 2012 to make WMI + WSMan + PowerShell work with devices that implement DMTF's CIM standards. As a continuation of this effort, Windows Server 2012 R2 includes a device management abstraction layer – referred to as the datacenter abstraction layer (DAL) - that further reduces the complexity of heterogeneous device management., with the goal that devices can be easily managed and configured using standards technologies and based on the same DAL architecture. Windows Server 2012 R2 will allow customers to 1) enable device management using a common abstraction layer, working over standard protocol and schema; 2) move from a complex datacenter device world into a world of well-defined, standard based components; and 3) build ready to use solution for device management right in Windows.
IT demands: Continuously available and resilient network infrastructure:
IT needs to help ensure that services are running continuously without any interruption. This means that there is automatic recovery from both software and hardware failures, with the need for an IT Pro or network administrator to fix issues in the middle of night now eliminated. Imagine multiple services sharing common infrastructure and having the ability to get a consistent bandwidth for each of these services and finally provide a common infrastructure that supports a heterogeneous/multi vendor environment.
WS12R2 delivers: High-performance networking:
Customers want to get the best performance out of the hardware they have – whether they are industry standard hardware or high end hardware that they have already invested in. Poor network performance are primarily because of two reasons – limitations in network bandwidth, limitations in the processing power -, and these typically affect availability and resiliency of the network infrastructure directly. A considerable amount of work has been done in Windows Server 2012 R2 to extract great and predictable performance inbox, as well as to make the most out of next generation hardware. Among other things, new features and updates in Windows Server 2012 R2 include:
SMB Direct (RDMA)
Single Root I/O Virtualization:
Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is a standard introduced by the PCI-SIG, the special-interest group that owns and manages PCI specifications as open industry standards. SR-IOV works in conjunction with system chipset support for virtualization technologies that provide remapping of interrupts and Direct Memory Access, and allows SR-IOV-capable devices to be assigned directly to a virtual machine.
Introduced with Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V enables support for SR‑IOV-capable network devices and allows an SR‑IOV virtual function of a physical network adapter to be assigned directly to a virtual machine. This increases network throughput and reduces network latency while also reducing the host CPU overhead required for processing network traffic. You can configure your systems to maximize the use of host system processors and memory to effectively handle the most demanding workloads. These Hyper-V features let enterprises take full advantage of the largest available host systems to deploy mission-critical, tier-1 business applications with large, demanding workloads. And unlike with competitive implementations of SR-IOV, key features such as live migration, high availability and fault tolerance are still supported.
Virtual Receive-Side Scaling
NIC Teaming:
see separate slide
IT demands: Greater control and more extensibility:
Better manageability and control is one of the most important challenges customers face. This spans from the ability to automate regular tasks to having the control over the entire IP address infrastructure, no matter what the size of your organization is, to having the ability to get the best performance on a multi-site environment, and finally to providing enterprises and hosting providers with a way to track resource usage and build chargeback/show-back solutions.
WS12R2 delivers: Improved manageability and diagnostics:
Windows Server 2012 R2 builds on the networking advances in Windows Server 2012 with an array of new and enhanced features that help reduce networking complexity while lowering costs and simplifying management tasks. With Windows Server 2012 R2, IT administrators have tools to automate and consolidate networking processes and resources. Among other things, new features and updates in Windows Server 2012 R2 include:
Resource metering:
Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 helps providers build a multitenant environment in which virtual machines can be served to multiple clients in a more isolated and secure way. Because a single client may have many virtual machines, aggregation of resource use data can be a challenging task. However, Windows Server 2012 R2 simplifies this task by using resource pools, a feature available in Hyper-V. Resource pools are logical containers that collect the resources of the virtual machines that belong to one client, permitting single-point querying of the client’s overall resource use. Resource Metering in Windows Server 2012 R2 can measure the following:
The average CPU, in megahertz, used by a virtual machine over a period of time.
The average physical memory, in megabytes, used by a virtual machine over a period of time.
The lowest amount of physical memory, in megabytes, assigned to a virtual machine over a period of time.
The highest amount of physical memory, in megabytes, assigned to a virtual machine over a period of time.
The highest amount of disk space capacity, in megabytes, allocated to a virtual machine over a period of time.
The total incoming network traffic, in megabytes, for a virtual network adapter over a period of time.
The total outgoing network traffic, in megabytes, for a virtual network adapter over a period of time.
Virtual IP Address Management:
See separate slide
QoS management:
Since Windows Server 2012, you can manage QoS policies and settings dynamically with Windows PowerShell. The QoS cmdlets support both the QoS functionalities available in Windows Server 2008 R2—such as maximum bandwidth and priority tagging—and new features that became available in Windows Server 2012, such as minimum bandwidth. QoS minimum bandwidth benefits vary from public cloud hosting providers to enterprises. Most hosting providers and enterprises today use a dedicated network adapter and a dedicated network for a specific type of workload such as storage or live migration to help achieve network performance isolation on a server running Hyper‑V. For service providers, QoS management allows them to host customers on a server running Hyper‑V and still be able to provide a certain level of performance based on SLAs. It also helps them to ensure that customers won’t be affected or compromised by other customers on their shared infrastructure, which includes computing, storage, and network resources. For enterprises, QoS management allows them to run multiple application servers on a server running Hyper‑V and be confident that each application server will deliver predictable performance, eliminating the fear of virtualization due to lack of performance predictability.
DNS traffic management:
There has been increasing demand for a feature where the customer can control the resolution of certain DNS records based on the client information. With the advent of global markets and hosted server farms serving to different part of the world, providing geo-politically apt answers to DNS queries is required for better Quality of Service to end users. For the enterprise customers who want to deploy split-horizon DNS to separate the internal and external queries, maintaining two different versions of the server is a management headache. A solution to this problem is to allow customers to maintain the records at the same place while deciding resolution policies based on the incoming query. In Windows Server 2012 R2, DNS traffic management enhances the existing DNS Server Plugin to Custom Policy Plugin and uses ZoneScopes to provide DNSSEC support (including online signing and automation of key creation and rollover) for DNS data served by a Customer Logic.
Talking points
Networking is fundamental to the datacenter and customers are generally familiar with how it’s done – so networking is just taken as a “given”. We believe there’s lot of upside in helping customers rethink how they approach networking (through a combination of software and hardware) in a private or hybrid cloud computing environment.
To transform networking, customers need to think about networking in the same way that they think about compute – i.e. as a shared, automated pool of capacity. They also need to think about how to reduce operational complexity in networking. Finally, they need a solution that can seamlessly bridge on-premises and off-premises networks.
To address the above, Microsoft is committed to delivering on an open, extensible & standards-based solution that has its origin in how we deliver networking for global hi-scale online services like Windows Azure or Bing. It turns out that our key learning is centered around the promises of flexibility, automation and control.
Specific bullets
Isolated virtual networks running on shared network infrastructure – Hyper-V Network Virtualization in Windows Server 2012 is key to abstracting the physical network intricacies from apps/workloads. This is key to meeting the multitenancy and isolation requirements that exist in service provider or large enterprise IT organizations (that serve multiple LOB constituents or dev/test/production environments). This needs to be reiterated as it is the foundation of our software-defined promise and solves a key customer need today. Many customers have asked us for the ability to deeply integrate Hyper-V networking into their existing network infrastructure, their existing monitoring and security tools, or with other types of specialized functionality – to meet that need, Windows Server 2012 also introduced the Hyper-V Extensible Switch that enables easy extensions of our hypervisor platform.
In-box multitenant edge gateway for seamless connectivity between physical & virtual networks – This software-based gateway will help customers easily extend their datacenter into a service provider environment by providing a termination point for site to site connectivity and enabling end-users access company resources that might be hosted at the service provider. Simultaneously, the gateway will be multitenant aware and hence enables the service provider to drive operational efficiency by enabling multiple customer connections terminate on it. More importantly, the gateway enables seamless bridging between the customers’ physical and virtual networks (NV-GRE based) by offering the necessary translation, thereby enabling broader adoption of hybrid networking with bring-your-own-IP (BYOIP) enablement. It should be noted that System Center Virtual Machine Manager is needed to provision and configure remote access and Hyper-V Network Virtualization in this context.
Self-service virtual network provisioning and management – Enterprises can easily connect their on-premises infrastructure to service providers by using a self-service experience to provision and manage connectivity and access. This self-service experience will be delivered through Windows Azure Services for Windows Server technologies that we’re now introducing to enterprises too.
Standards-based automated network switch configuration - Transforming the datacenter involves abstracting storage, compute and network resources from their underlying physical hardware and manage them in a standardized manner. To support this thinking, Microsoft will enable a plugin for System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage top-of-rack network switches that support OMI. We’re working with our networking OEM partners to assure availability of hardware that meet this requirement.
Partner ecosystem support – A variety of partners have extended their support to offer solutions like merchant silicon, Hyper-V Switch extensions and NVGRE gateways. We will continue to work with these partners to offer customers the choice of networking solutions to best meet their needs.
Note to presenter: 3 clicks to complete build.
Windows Server 2012 helps you provide fault tolerance on your network adapters without having to buy additional hardware and software. Windows Server 2012 includes NIC Teaming as a new feature, which allows multiple network interfaces to work together as a team, preventing connectivity loss if one network adapter fails. It allows a server to tolerate network adapter and port failure up to the first switch segment. NIC Teaming also allows you to aggregate bandwidth from multiple network adapters, for example, so four 1‑gigabyte (GB) network adapters can provide an aggregate of 4 GB/second of throughput. In Windows Server 2012 R2, the load-balancing algorithms have been enhanced with the goal to better utilize all NICs in the team, significantly improving performance.
The advantages of a Windows teaming solution are that it works with all network adapter vendors, spares you from most potential problems that proprietary solutions cause, provides a common set of management tools for all adapter types, and is fully supported by Microsoft.
Teaming network adapters involves the following:
NIC Teaming configurations. Two or more physical network adapters connect to the NIC Teaming solution’s multiplexing unit and present one or more “virtual adapters” (team network adapters) to the operating system.
Algorithms for traffic distribution. Several different algorithms distribute inbound and outbound traffic between the network adapters. Team network adapters exist in third-party NIC Teaming solutions to divide traffic by virtual local area network (VLAN) so that applications can connect to different VLANs simultaneously. Like other commercial implementations of NIC Teaming, Windows Server 2012 has this capability.
