Sorry for missing the previous digest – I spent the whole weekend doing 3 legs half across the world in the time-loss direction… really don't like flying that way, also due to much worse jet lag. The other way works awesome for me – I still remember one day when I woke up in Europe, did 3 + 12 hours economy flights to San Francisco – and was in the Chieftain Pub by Moscone just in time and still in a good shape to enjoy SuperBowl XLIX. The world started to feel very small from that day! But also very cozy, because Patriots won!
So, in the previous digest I reported the confirmed data corruption issue with full backups due to the incorrect allocated VMDK blocks list returned by API. In the past two weeks since then, there has been significant progress in the research thanks to joint collaboration between all three companies involved – Veeam, HPE Nimble and VMware. While VMware was not been able to identify the root cause yet, that first support tool they created removed Nimble storage from the list of potential suspects. The allocated blocks data returned by Nimble storage matched what VMware expected to see, thus ruling out any Nimble-specific issues. Which actually makes it bad news for everyone else, because this significantly increases the scope of users that may be potentially impacted by this issue - even if at this time, we're still only aware of a single customer affected. Anyway, VMware VADP team is now developing a second support tool to investigate the other part of the stack. I'll keep providing updates in this newsletter, as well as in the corresponding forum thread as significant research breakthroughs happen.
Huge news for all ReFS users! Together with many of you, we've spent countless hours discussing that strange ReFS support policy update from last year, which essentially limited ReFS to Storage Spaces and standalone disks only. So no RAID controllers, no FC or iSCSI LUNs, no nothing – just plain vanilla disks, period. As you know, I've been keeping in touch with Microsoft ReFS team on this issue all the time, translating the official WHYs they were giving me and being devil's advocate, so to speak (true MVP eh). Secretly though, I was not giving up and kept the firm push on them – just because this limitation did not make any sense to me. Still, I can never take all the credit because I know I'd still be banging my head against the wall today if one awesome guy - Andrew Hansen - did not join that Microsoft team as the new PM. He took the issue very seriously and worked diligently to get to the bottom of this, eventually clearing up what in the end appeared to be one big internal confusion that started from a single bad documentation edit.
Bottom line: ReFS is in fact fully supported on ANY storage hardware that is listed on Microsoft HCL. This includes general purpose servers with certified RAID controllers, such as Cisco S3260 (see statement under Basic Disks), as well as FC and iSCSI LUNs on SAN such as HPE Nimble (under Backup Target). What about those flush concerns we've talked about so much? These concerns are in fact 100% valid, but guess what – apparently, Microsoft storage certification process has always included the dedicated flush test tool designed to ensure this command is respected by the RAID controller, with data being protected in all scenarios – including from power loss during write – using technologies like battery-backed write cache (for example, S3260 uses supercapacitor for this purpose). Anyway - I'm super excited to see this resolved, as this was obviously a huge roadblock to ReFS proliferation.
Last week, we've made the Pure Storage plug-in generally available, bringing all the benefits of our advanced storage snapshots integration to Pure Storage users, some of which have actually already deployed one. Following IBM SVC and Infinidat, this makes it 3rd integration already that uses the Universal Storage API. But what's really cool is that we've released this plug-in just 6 weeks after shipping the Infinidat one! As you can see, this new framework really did allow us to accelerate new integrations in a few times WITHOUT sacrificing the quality (as the whole quality control is still on our QC team). So this seem to be working extremely well for us and, importantly, the storage vendors.
Windows Admin Center aka Project "Honolulu" is now generally available! I've blogged so much about this one here, and by now you know how much I love this new management UI. So do me a favor in return please - do check it out now that it is out of beta (but still completely FREE), and spread the word if you like it too! As this is the only way we can ensure Microsoft keeps developers on this awesome project ;)
I know I'm beating a dead horse that is Veritas here, but it was too hard to pass on sharing the real world feedback with such a juicy numbers. Night and day! And before someone makes a sad joke on this being the result of the QueryChangedDiskAreas API bug – no, actually this is coming from a Hyper-V environment ;) |
Komentáře
Okomentovat