Our ebay development S2D cluster

During this summer i decided i wanted to test out Storage Spaces Direct. TP5 was out and i was quite eager to test it out. Now it’s been upgraded to RTM with cluster rolling upgrade. Rember to run Update-ClusterFunctionalLevel after.

So i look arround on ebay for some servers and other items i needed to buy. I ended up with the list under all in 4x

• HP DL380 G6 16 bay 128GB mem, 2x4core Intel CPU HP P420
• HP H220
• MellanoX ConnectX3 MCX312A-XCBT
• Intel 750 NVME PCIe
• 2x Kingston SSDNow V310 for caching(Replacing with Samsung SM863)
• 6x WD Red NAS 1tb 2.5″
• Dell Force Ten S4810P (Already had)

The price for all this without the switches and cables was about 90 000 nok, about 10 000 USD.

I cabled the HP H220 to controll the 2nd 8 bay HDD cage so give the HBA mode for the SSD and HDD. And 2 HP drives for OS in raid 0

I followed the guides from

For S2D setup

https://technet.microsoft.com/windows-server-docs/storage/storage-spaces/hyper-converged-solution-using-storage-spaces-direct

For RDMA setup on S4810P

http://bit.ly/2fty6vw

I setup managment over the 4 1GB netcards on the server. I will just post the powershell commands directly.

New-NetLbfoTeam -name Team1 -TeamMember NIC1,NIC2,NIC3,NIC4 -TeamingMode SwitchIndependent -LoadBalancingAlgorithm HyperVPort
New-VMSwitch “VSwitch” -MinimumBandwidthMode Weight -NetAdapterName “Team1" -AllowManagementOS 0
Set-VMSwitch “VSwitch” -DefaultFlowMinimumBandwidthWeight 50
Add-VMNetworkAdapter -ManagementOS -Name “Management” -SwitchName “VSwitch”
Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -ManagementOS -VMNetworkAdapterName “Management” -Access -VlanId "VLANID"

For the config on the server for RDMA and so on use these powershell commands

#Install DCB on the hosts
Install-WindowsFeature Data-Center-Bridging
#Mellanox/Windows RoCE drivers don\'t support DCBx (yet?), disable it.
Set-NetQosDcbxSetting -Willing $False
#Make sure RDMA is enable on the NIC (should be by default)
Enable-NetAdapterRdma –Name 10GNIC1
Enable-NetAdapterRdma –Name 10GNIC2

#SMB Direct traffic to port 445 is tagged with priority 4
New-NetQosPolicy "SMBDIRECT" -netDirectPortMatchCondition 445 -PriorityValue8021Action 4
#Anything else goes into the "default" bucket with priority tag 1
New-NetQosPolicy "DEFAULT" -default -PriorityValue8021Action 1
#Enable PFC (lossless) on the priority of the SMB Direct traffic.
Enable-NetQosFlowControl -Priority 4
#Disable PFC on the other traffic (TCP/IP, we don\'t need that to be lossless)
Disable-NetQosFlowControl 0,1,2,3,5,6,7
#Enable QoS on the RDMA interface
Enable-NetAdapterQos -InterfaceAlias 10GNIC1
Enable-NetAdapterQos -InterfaceAlias 10GNIC2
#Set the minimum bandwidth for SMB Direct traffic to 90% (ETS, optional)
#No need to do this for the other priorities as all those not configured
#explicitly goes in to default with the remaining bandwith.
New-NetQoSTrafficClass "SMBDirect" -Priority 4 -Bandwidth 90 -Algorithm ETS
#Configure VMSwitch and setup VMNetworkAdapters
New-VMSwitch -Name SETswitch -NetAdapterName "10GNIC1","10GNIC2" -EnableEmbeddedTeaming $true
Add-VMNetworkAdapter -SwitchName SETswitch -Name Cluster -managementOS
Add-VMNetworkAdapter -SwitchName SETswitch -Name LiveMigration -managementOS
Add-VMNetworkAdapter -SwitchName SETswitch -Name Storage -managementOS
Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -VMNetworkAdapterName "Cluster" -VlanId 5 -Access -ManagementOS
Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -VMNetworkAdapterName "LiveMigration" -VlanId 6 -Access -ManagementOS
Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -VMNetworkAdapterName "Storage" -VlanId 99 -Access -ManagementOS
Enable-NetAdapterRDMA "vEthernet (Cluster)","vEthernet (LiveMigration)","vEthernet (Storage)"

Get-SmbClientNetworkInterface

Test-Cluster -Node "SRV01", "SRV02", "SRV03", "SRV04" -Include "Storage Spaces Direct",Inventory,Network,"System Configuration"

New-Cluster -Name HyperV-S2D -Node "SRV01", "SRV02", "SRV03", "SRV04" -NoStorage -StaticAddress x.x.x.x

Enable-ClusterS2D

Get-StoragePool S2D* | FT FriendlyName, FaultDomainAwarenessDefault, OperationalStatus, HealthStatus -autosize

Get-StorageTier | FT FriendlyName, ResiliencySettingName, MediaType, PhysicalDiskRedundancy -autosize

Check to see if HDD has been set as capacity tier

If not run this command

Set-StorageTier -FriendlyName Capacity -MediaType HDD

Time to set volume

New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName S2D* -FriendlyName MRV -FileSystem CSVFS_REFS -StorageTierFriendlyName Performance, Capacity -StorageTierSizes 1800GB, 11000GB

enable CSV cache

(Get-Cluster). BlockCacheSize = 1024

This is how it will look in failover cluster manager