Using file copy to measure storage performance – Why it’s not a good idea and what you should do instead

1. Introduction Every once in a while I hear from someone that they believe they have a performance problem with their Scale-Out File Server. When I dig a little further, it’s very common to find that file copies are being used as the mechanism for measuring storage performance for all kinds of scenarios. This blog … Continue reading Using file copy to measure storage performance – Why it’s not a good idea and what you should do instead →

Understanding the files collected by the Test-StorageHealth.ps1 PowerShell script

I recently published a PowerShell script to check the health and capacity of a Storage Cluster based on Windows Server 2012 R2 Scale-Out File Servers. You can find details about this script (including the download link) in this blog post: PowerShell script for Storage Cluster Health Test published to the TechNet Script Center. This script, … Continue reading Understanding the files collected by the Test-StorageHealth.ps1 PowerShell script →

Sample C# code for using the latest WMI classes to manage Windows Storage

This blog post shows a bit of C# code to use the Windows Storage Management API (SM-API) classes that were introduced in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. You can find a list of these classes at class described at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh830612.aspx, including MSFT_PhysicalDisk, MSFT_StoragePool or MSFT_VirtualDisk. I found a number of examples with the … Continue reading Sample C# code for using the latest WMI classes to manage Windows Storage →

SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: SMB1 can now be completely removed

Introduction Windows Server 2012 R2 introduced a new version of SMB. Technically it’s SMB version 3.02, but we continue to call it just SMB3. The main changes are described at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831474.aspx. With this new release, we made a few changes in SMB PowerShell to support the new scenarios and features. This includes a few new … Continue reading SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: SMB1 can now be completely removed →

SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: SMB Delegation

SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: SMB Multi-instance

SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: SMB Bandwidth Limits

SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: SMB Witness improvements

SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: Scale-Out Rebalancing (per-share redirection)

SMB3 PowerShell changes in Windows Server 2012 R2: Simpler setting of ACL for the folder behind a share