Category: CIFS/SMB

QoM1610: Will NVMe over Fabric GA in enterprise AFA by Oct’2017

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, CIFS/SMB, Ethernet, FC, FCoE, File Storage, Forecasting, Infiniband, iSCSI, Networking, NFS, NVMe, NVMe storage, Omni-Path, QoM 2016, RDMA, RoCE, SSD storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points

NVMeNVMe over fabric (NVMeoF) was a hot topic at Flash Memory Summit last August. Facebook and others were showing off their JBOF (see my Facebook moving to JBOF post) but there were plenty of other NVMeoF offerings at the show.

NVMeoF hardware availability

When Brocade announced their Gen6 Switches they made a point of saying that both their Gen5 and Gen6 switches currently support NVMeoF protocols. In addition to Brocade’s support, in Dec 2015 Qlogic announced support for NVMeoF for select HBAs. Also, as of  July 2016, Emulex announced support for NVMeoF in their HBAs.

From an Ethernet perspective, Qlogic has a NVMe Direct NIC which supports NVMe protocol offload for iSCSI. But even without NVMe Direct, Ethernet 40GbE & 100GbE with  iWARP, RoCEv1-v2, iSCSI SER, or iSCSI RDMA all could readily support NVMeoF on Ethernet. The nice thing about NVMeoF for Ethernet is not only do you get support for iSCSI & FCoE, but CIFS/SMB and NFS as well.

InfiniBand and Omni-Path Architecture already support native RDMA, so they should already support NVMeoF.

So hardware/firmware is already available for any enterprise AFA customer to want NVMeoF for their data center storage.

NVMeoF Software

Intel claims that ~90% of the software driver functionality of NVMe is the same for NVMeoF. The primary differences between the two seem to be the NVMeoY discovery and queueing mechanisms.

There are two fabric methods that can be used to implement NVMeoF data and command transfers: capsule mode where NVMe commands and data are encapsulated in normal fabric packets or fabric dependent mode where drivers make use of native fabric memory transfer mechanisms (RDMA, …) to transfer commands and data.

12679485_245179519150700_14553389_nA (Linux) host driver for NVMeoF is currently available from Seagate. And as a result, support for NVMeoF for Linux is currently under development, and  not far from release in the next Kernel (I think). (Mellanox has a tutorial on how to compile a Linux kernel with NVMeoF driver support).

With Linux coming out, Microsoft Windows and VMware can’t be far behind. However, I could find nothing online, aside from base NVMe support, for either platform.

NVMeoF target support is another matter but with NICs/HBAs & switch hardware/firmware and drivers presently available, proprietary storage system target drivers are just a matter of time.

Boot support is a major concern. I could find no information on BIOS support for booting off of a NVMeoF AFA. Arguably, one may not need boot support for NVMeoF AFAs as they are probably not a viable target for storing App code or OS software.

From what I could tell, normal fabric multi-pathing support should work fine with NVMeoF. This should allow for HA NVMeoF storage, a critical requirement for enterprise AFA storage systems these days.

NVMeoF advantages/disadvantages

Chelsio and others have shown that NVMeoF adds ~8μsec of additional overhead beyond native NVMe SSDs, which if true would warrant implementation on all NVMe AFAs. This may or may not impact max IOPS depending on scale-ability of NVMeoF.

For instance, servers (PCIe bus hardware) typically limit the number of private NVMe SSDs to 255 or less. With an NVMeoF, one could potentially have 1000s of shared NVMe SSDs accessible to a single server. With this scale, one could have a single server attached to a scale-out NVMeoF AFA (cluster) that could supply ~4X the IOPS that a single server could perform using private NVMe storage.

Base level NVMe SSD support and protocol stacks are starting to be available for most flash vendors and operating systems such as, Linux, FreeBSD, VMware, Windows, and Solaris. If Intel’s claim of 90% common software between NVMe and NVMeoF drivers is true, then it should be a relatively easy development project to provide host NVMeoF drivers.

The need for special Ethernet hardware that supports RDMA may delay some storage vendors from implementing NVMeoF AFAs quickly. The lack of BIOS boot support may be a minor irritant in comparison.

NVMeoF forecast

AFA storage systems, as far as I can tell, are all about selling high IOPS and very-low latency IOs. It would seem that NVMeoF would offer early adopter AFA storage vendors a significant performance advantage over slower paced competition.

In previous QoM/QoW posts we have established that there are about 13 new enterprise storage systems that come out each year. Probably 80% of these will be AFA, given the current market environment.

Of the 10.4 AFA systems coming out over the next year, ~20% of these systems pride themselves on being the lowest latency solutions in the market, and thus command high margins. One would think these systems would be the first to adopt NVMeoF. But, most of these systems have their own, proprietary flash modules and do not use standard (NVMe) SSDs and can use their own proprietary interface to their proprietary flash storage. This will delay any implementation for them until they can convert their flash storage to NVMe which may take some time.

On the other hand, most (70%) of the other AFA systems, that currently use SAS/SATA SSDs, could boost their IOP counts and drastically reduce their IO  response times, by implementing NVMe SSDs and NVMeoF. But converting SAS/SATA backends to NVMe will take time and effort.

But, there are a select few (~10%) of AFA systems, that already use NVMe SSDs in their AFAs, and for these few, they would seem to have a fast track towards implementing NVMeoF. The fact that NVMeoF is supported over all fabrics and all storage interface protocols make it even easier.

Moreover, NVMeoF has been under discussion since the summer of 2015, which tells me that astute AFA vendors have already had 18+ months to develop it. With NVMeoF host drivers & hardware available since Dec. 2015, means hardware and software exist to test and validate against.

I believe that NVMeoF will be GA’d within the next 12 months by at least one enterprise AFA system. So my QoM1610 forecast for NVMeoF is YES, with a 0.83 probability.

Comments?

 

 

 

Exablox, bring your own disk storage

Posted on by Ray in CIFS/SMB, Clustered storage, Data reduction, Ethernet, File Storage, NFS, Object storage

We talked with Exablox a month or so ago at Storage Field Day 10 (SFD10) and they discussed some of their unique storage solution and new software functionality. If you’re not familiar with Exablox they sell a OneBlox appliance with drive slots, but no data drives.

The OneBlox appliance provides a Linux based, scale-out, distributed object storage software with a file system in front of it. They support SMB and NFS access protocols and have inline deduplication, data compression and continuous snapshot capabilities. You supply the (SATA or SAS) drives, a bring your own drive (BYOD) storage offering.

Their OneSystem management solution is available on a subscription basis, which usually runs in the cloud as a web accessed service offering used to monitor and manage your Exablox cluster(s). However, for those customers that want it, OneSystem is also available as a Docker Container, where you can run it on any Docker compatible system.
Continue reading “Exablox, bring your own disk storage” →

What’s next for Nexenta

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, CIFS/SMB, Clustered storage, DAS, desktop virtualization, Distributed computing, iSCSI, NFS, Object storage, Storage, Strategic Inflection Points

We talked with Nexenta at Storage Field Day 6 where they discussed their current and future software defined storage solutions. I highly encourage you to see the SFD6 videos of their sessions if you want to learn more about them.

Nexenta was an earlier adopter of software defined storage and have recently signed with Solinea to support Nexenta under OpenStack CINDER block storage. Nexenta is based on ZFS and supports inline deduplication and advanced performance functionality.

NexentaStor™

NexentaStor™ is there base storage software and comes as a download in both an Enterprise edition and Community edition. NexentaStor can run on most industry standard, x86 server platforms.

  • The Community edition supports up to 18TB and uses DAS and/or SAS connected storage to supply NFS and SMB file services.
  • The Enterprise edition extends capacity into the PB and supports FC and iSCSI block storage services as well as file services. The Enterprise edition supports plugins for HA solutions and storage replication.

Nexenta mentioned that they had over 6500 customers for NexentaStor of which 1500 are cloud service providers. But they have a whole lot more to offer than just NexentaStor including NexentaConnect™ and coming soon, NexentaEdge™ and NexentaFusion™.

NexentaConnect™

NexentaConnect software works with VMware or Citrix solutions to provide advanced storage services, such as file services, IO acceleration, and storage automation/analytics. There are three products in the NexentaConnect family:

  • NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN – by combining NexentaConnect together with VMware Virtual SAN software and DAS or SAS storage one can offer NFS and SMB/CIFS file services.  Prior to NexentaConnect, VMware Virtual SAN storage only provided VMware dedicated SAN storage, but now that same infrastructure can be used for any NFS or SMB/CIFS file system storage.
  • NexentaConnect for VMware Horizon – by combining NexentaConnect with VMware Horizon and DAS plus local SSD storage, one can provide accelerated virtual desktop IO with state of the art write logging, inline deduplication, and GUI based storage automation/analytics.
  • NexentaConnect for Citrix XenDesktop (in Beta now) – by combining NexentaConnect with Citrix XenDesktop software and DAS plus local SSD storage, one can accelerate XenDesktop IO and ease the management of XenDesktop storage.

Nexenta has teamed up with Dell to offer Dell-Nexenta (and VMware) storage solution using NexentaConnect and VMware Virtual SAN software on Dell hardware.

NexentaEdge™

They spent a lot of time on NexentaEdge and what they plan to offer is a software defined object storage solution. Most object storage systems on the market either started as software only or currently support a software only version. But Nexenta is the first to come at it from a file services heritage that I know of.

NexentaEdge will offer iSCSI services as well as standard object storage services such as Amazon S3 and OpenStack SWIFT. Their solution splits up objects into chunks and replicates/distributes the object chunks across their software defined (object) storage cluster.

Cluster communications uses UDP (not TCP) and so has less overhead. NexentaEdge cluster communications uses their own Replicast protocol to send messages and data out across the cluster. .

They designed NexentaEdge to be able to support Shingle Magnetic Recording (SMR) disks which are very dense storage but occasionally have to go “away” while they perform  garbage collection/re-organization. I did two posts about SMR disks a while back (see Shingled magnetic recording disks and Sequential-only disk for more information on SMR).

I have to admit I had a BIG problem with support for iSCSI over eventually consistent storage. I don’t see how this can be used to support ACID database requests but I suppose Nexenta would argue that anyone using object storage for ACID database IO needs to have their head examined.

NexentaFusion™

Although this was not discussed as much, NexentaFusion is another future offering supplying software defined storage analytics and orchestration automation. They intent is to use NexentaFusion with NexentaStor, NexentaConnect and/or NexentaEdge. As you scale up your Nexenta storage cluster, automation/orchestration and storage analytics starts to become a more pressing need. According to Nexenta’s website NexentaFusion 1.0 will support multi-tennant storage monitoring and real time storage analytics while NexentaFusion 2.0 will supportstorage provisioning and orchestration.

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Nexenta provided Converse all-star shoes to all the participants as well as pens and notebooks. I had to admit I liked the look of the new tennis shoes but my wife and kids thought I was crazy.

Different views on Nexenta from the other SFD6 bloggers can be found below:

SFD6 – Day 2 – Nexenta from PenguinPunk (Dan Firth, @PenguinPunk)

Nexenta – Back in da house by Nigel Poulton (@NigelPoulton)

Sorry Nexenta, but I don’t get it … and questions arise by Juku (Enrico Signoretti, @ESignoretti)

Day 2 at SFD6: Nexenta by Absolutely Windows (John Obeto, @JohnObeto)

New SPECsfs2008 CIFS/SMB vs. NFS (again) – chart of the month

Posted on by Ray in CIFS/SMB, CIFS/SMB throughput, File Storage, NFS, NFS throughput, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Storage performance
SPECsfs2008 benchmark results for CIFS/SMB vs. NFS protocol performance
SCISFS140326-001 (c) 2014 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The above chart represents another in a long line of charts on the relative performance of CIFS[/SMB] versus NFS file interface protocols. The information on the chart are taken from vendor submissions that used the same exact hardware configurations for both NFS and CIFS/SMB protocol SPECsfs2008 benchmark submissions.

There are generally two charts I show in our CIFS/SMB vs. NFS analysis, the one above and another that shows a ops/sec per spindle count analysis for all NFS and CIFS/SMB submissions.  Both have historically indicated that CIFS/SMB had an advantage. The one above shows the total number of NFS or CIFS/SMB operations per second on the two separate axes and provides a linear regression across the data. The above shows that, on average, the CIFS/SMB protocol provides about 40% more (~36.9%) operations per second than NFS protocol does with the same hardware configuration.

However, there are a few caveats about this and my other CIFS/SMB vs. NFS comparison charts:

  • The SPECsfs2008 organization has informed me (and posted on their website) that  CIFS[/SMB] and NFS are not comparable.  CIFS/SMB is a stateful protocol and NFS is stateless and the corresponding commands act accordingly. My response to them and my readers is that they both provide file access, to a comparable set of file data (we assume, see my previous post on What’s wrong with SPECsfs2008) and in many cases today, can provide access to the exact same file, using both protocols on the same storage system.
  • The SPECsfs2008 CIFS/SMB benchmark does slightly more read and slightly less write data operations than their corresponding NFS workloads. Specifically, their CIFS/SMB workload does 20.5% and 8.6% READ_ANDX and WRITE_ANDX respectively CIFS commands vs. 18% and 9% READ and WRITE respectively NFS commands.
  • There are fewer CIFS/SMB benchmark submissions than NFS and even fewer with the same exact hardware (only 13). So the statistics comparing the two in this way must be considered preliminary, even though the above linear regression is very good (R**2 at ~0.98).
  • Many of the submissions on the above chart are for smaller systems. In fact 5 of the 13 submissions were for storage systems that delivered less than 20K NFS ops/sec which may be skewing the results and most of which can be seen above bunched up around the origin of the graph.

And all of this would all be wonderfully consistent if not for a recent benchmark submission by NetApp on their FAS8020 storage subsystem.  For once NetApp submitted the exact same hardware for both a NFS and a CIFS/SMB submission and lo and behold they performed better on NFS (110.3K NFS ops/sec) than they did on CIFS/SMB (105.1K CIFS ops/sec) or just under ~5% better on NFS.

Luckily for the chart above this was a rare event and most others that submitted both did better on CIFS/SMB. But I have been proven wrong before and will no doubt be proven wrong again. So I plan to update this chart whenever we get more submissions for both CIFS/SMB and NFS with the exact same hardware so we can see a truer picture over time.

For those with an eagle eye, you can see NetApp’s FAS8020 submission as the one below the line in the first box above the origin which indicates they did better on NFS than CIFS/SMB.

Comments?

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The complete SPECsfs2008  performance report went out in SCI’s March 2014 newsletter.  But a copy of the report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime next quarter (if all goes well).  However, you can get the latest storage performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just using the signup form above right.

Even more performance information on NFS and CIFS/SMB protocols, including our ChampionCharts™ for file storage can be found in  SCI’s recently (March 2014) updated NAS Buying Guide, on sale from our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our SPECsfs2008 performance reports or any of our other storage performance analyses.

Who’s the next winner in data storage?

Posted on by Ray in CIFS/SMB, Cloud services, Cloud storage, data access, Data availability, data services, Distributed computing, FC, FCoE, NFS, Object storage, Storage, Storage availability, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Visionary organizations
Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)
Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

“The future is already here – just not evenly distributed”, W. Gibson

It starts as it always does outside the enterprise data center. In the line of businesses, in the development teams, in the small business organizations that don’t know any better but still have an unquenchable need for data storage.

It’s essentially an Innovator’s Dillemma situation. The upstarts are coming into the market at the lower end, lower margin side of the business that the major vendors don’t seem to care about, don’t service very well and are ignoring to their peril.

Yes, it doesn’t offer all the data services that the big guns (EMC, Dell, HDS, IBM, and NetApp) have. It doesn’t offer the data availability and reliability that enterprise data centers have come to demand from their storage. require. And it doesn’t have the performance of major enterprise data storage systems.

But what it does offer, is lower CapEx, unlimited scaleability, and much easier to manage and adopt data storage, albeit using a new protocol. It does have some inherent, hard to get around problems not the least of which is speed of data ingest/egress, highly variable latency and eventual consistency. There are other problems which are more easily solvable, with work, but the three listed above are intrinsic to the solution and need to be dealt with systematically.

And the winner is …

It has to be cloud storage providers and the big elephant in the room has to be Amazon. I know there’s a lot of hype surrounding AWS S3 and EC2 but you must admit that they are growing, doubling year over year. Yes it is starting from a much lower capacity point and yes, they are essentially providing “rentable” data storage space with limited or even non-existant storage services. But they are opening up whole new ways to consume storage that never existed before. And therein lies their advantage and threat to the major storage players today, unless they act to counter this upstart.

On AWS’s EC2 website there must be 4 dozen different applications that can be fired up in the matter of a click or two. When I checked out S3 you only need to signup and identify a bucket name to start depositing data (files, objects). After that, you are charged for the storage used, data transfer out (data in is free), and the number of HTTP GETs, PUTs, and other requests that are done on a per month basis. The first 5GB is free and comes with a judicious amount of gets, puts, and out data transfer bandwidth.

… but how can they attack the enterprise?

Aside from the three systemic weaknesses identified above, for enterprise customers they seem to lack enterprise security, advanced data services and high availability storage. Yes, NetApp’s Amazon Direct addresses some of the issues by placing enterprise owned, secured and highly available storage to be accessed by EC2 applications. But to really take over and make a dent in enterprise storage sales, Amazon needs something with enterprise class data services, availability and security with an on premises storage gateway that uses and consumes cloud storage, i.e., a cloud storage gateway. That way they can meet or exceed enterprise latency and services requirements at something that approximates S3 storage costs.

We have talked about cloud storage gateways before but none offer this level of storage service. An enterprise class S3 gateway would need to support all storage protocols, especially block (FC, FCoE, & iSCSI) and file (NFS & CIFS/SMB). It would need enterprise data services, such as read-writeable snapshots, thin provisioning, data deduplication/compression, and data mirroring/replication (synch and asynch). It would need to support standard management configuration capabilities, like VMware vCenter, Microsoft System Center, and SMI-S. It would need to mask the inherent variable latency of cloud storage through memory, SSD and hard disk data caching/tiering.. It would need to conceal the eventual consistency nature of cloud storage (see link above). And it would need to provide iron-clad, data security for cloud storage.

It would also need to be enterprise hardened, highly available and highly reliable. That means dually redundant, highly serviceable hardware FRUs, concurrent code load, multiple controllers with multiple, independent, high speed links to the internet. Todays, highly-available data storage requires multi-path storage networks, multiple-independent power sources and resilient cooling so adding multiple-independent, high-speed internet links to use Amazon S3 in the enterprise is not out of the question. In addition to the highly available and serviceable storage gateway capabilities described above it would need to supply high data integrity and reliability.

Who could build such a gateway?

I would say any of the major and some of the minor data storage players could easily do an S3 gateway if they desired. There are a couple of gateway startups (see link above) that have made a stab at it but none have it quite down pat or to the extent needed by the enterprise.

However, the problem with standalone gateways from other, non-Amazon vendors is that they could easily support other cloud storage platforms and most do. This is great for gateway suppliers but bad for Amazon’s market share.

So, I believe Amazon has to invest in it’s own storage gateway if they want to go after the enterprise. Of course, when they create an enterprise cloud storage gateway they will piss off all the other gateway providers and will signal their intention to target the enterprise storage market.

So who is the next winner in data storage – I have to believe its going to be and already is Amazon. Even if they don’t go after the enterprise which I feel is the major prize, they have already carved out an unbreachable market share in a new way to implement and use storage. But when (not if) they go after the enterprise, they will threaten every major storage player.

Yes but what about others?

Arguably, Microsoft Azure is in a better position than Amazon to go after the enterprise. Since their acquisition of StorSimple last year, they already have a gateway that with help, could be just what they need to provide enterprise class storage services using Azure. And they already have access to the enterprise, already have the services, distribution and goto market capabilities that addresses enterprise needs and requirements. Maybe they have it all but they are not yet at the scale of Amazon. Could they go after this – certainly, but will they?

Google is the other major unknown. They certainly have the capability to go after enterprise cloud storage if they want. They already have Google Cloud Storage, which is priced under Amazon’s S3 and provides similar services as far as I can tell. But they have even farther to go to get to the scale of Amazon. And they have less of the marketing, selling and service capabilities that are required to be an enterprise player. So I think they are the least likely of the big three cloud providers to be successful here.

There are many other players in cloud services that could make a play for enterprise cloud storage and emerge out of the pack, namely Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and others. I suppose DropBox, Box and the other file sharing/collaboration providers might also be able to take a shot at it, if they wanted. But I am not sure any of them have enterprise storage on their radar just yet.

And I wouldn’t leave out the current major storage, networking and server players as they all could potentially go after enterprise cloud storage if they wanted to. And some are partly there already.

Comments?

 

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Windows Server 2012 R2 storage changes announced at TechEd

Posted on by Ray in CIFS/SMB, Cloud storage, DAS, desktop virtualization, Ethernet, File Storage, RDMA, RoCE, Server virtualization, SSD storage, Storage performance

Microsoft TechEd Trends driving IT todayMicrosoft TechEd USA is this week and they announced a number of changes to the storage services that come with Windows Server 2012 R2

  • Azure DRaaS – Microsoft is attempting to democratize DR by supporting a new DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS).  They now have an Azure service that operates in conjunction with Windows Server 2012 R2 that provides orchestration and automation for DR site failover and fail back to/from remote sites.  Windows Server 2012 R2 uses Hyper-V Replica to replicate data across to the other site. Azure DRaaS supports DR plans (scripts) to identify groups of Hyper-V VMs which need to be brought up and their sequencing. VMs within a script group are brought up in parallel but different groups are brought up in sequence.  You can have multiple DR plans, just select the one to execute. You must have access to Azure to use this service. Azure DR plans can pause for manual activities and have the ability to invoke PowerShell scripts for more fine tuned control.  There’s also quite a lot of setup that must be done, e.g. configure Hyper-V hosts, VMs and networking at both primary and secondary locations.  Network IP injection is done via mapping primary to secondary site IP addresses. The Azzure DRaaS really just provides the orchestration of failover or fallback activity. Moreover, it looks like Azure DRaaS is going to be offered by service providers as well as private companies. Currently, Azure’s DRaaS has no support for SAN/NAS replication but they are working with vendors to supply an SRM-like API to provide this.
  • Hyper-V Replica changes – Replica support has been changed from a single fixed asynchronous replication interval (5 minutes) to being able to select one of 3 intervals: 15 seconds; 5 minutes; or 30 minutes.
  • Storage Spaces Automatic Tiering – With SSDs and regular rotating disk in your DAS (or JBOD) configuration , Windows Server 2012 R2 supports automatic storage tiering. At Spaces configuration time one dedicates a certain portion of SSD storage to tiering.  There is a scheduled Windows Server 2012 task which is then used to scan the previous periods file activity and identify which file segments (=1MB in size) that should be on SSD and which should not. Then over time file segments are moved to an  appropriate tier and then, performance should improve.  This only applies to file data and files can be pinned to a particular tier for more fine grained control.
  • Storage Spaces Write-Back cache – Another alternative is to dedicate a certain portion of SSDs in a Space to write caching. When enabled, writes to a Space will be cached first in SSD and then destaged out to rotating disk.  This should speed up write performance.  Both write back cache and storage tiering can be enabled for the same Space. But your SSD storage must be partitioned between the two. Something about funneling all write activity to SSDs just doesn’t make sense to me?!
  • Storage Spaces dual parity – Spaces previously supported mirrored storage and single parity but now also offers dual parity for DAS.  Sort of like RAID6 in protection but they didn’t mention the word RAID at all.  Spaces dual parity does have a write penalty (parity update) and Microsoft suggests using it only for archive or heavy read IO.
  • SMB3.1 performance improvements of ~50% – SMB has been on a roll lately and R2 is no exception. Microsoft indicated that SMB direct using a RAM DISK as backend storage can sustain up to a million 8KB IOPS. Also, with an all-flash JBOD, using a mirrored Spaces for backend storage, SMB3.1 can sustain ~600K IOPS.  Presumably these were all read IOPS.
  • SMB3.1 logging improvements – Changes were made to SMB3.1 event logging to try to eliminate the need for detail tracing to support debug. This is an ongoing activity but one which is starting to bear fruit.
  • SMB3.1 CSV performance rebalancing – Now as one adds cluster nodes,  Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) control nodes will spread out across new nodes in order to balance CSV IO across the whole cluster.
  • SMB1 stack can be (finally) fully removed – If you are running Windows Server 2012, you no longer need to install the SMB1 stack.  It can be completely removed. Of course, if you have some downlevel servers or clients you may want to keep SMB1 around a bit longer but it’s no longer required for Server 2012 R2.
  • Hyper-V Live Migration changes – Live migration can now take advantage of SMB direct and its SMB3 support of RDMA/RoCE to radically speed up data center live migration. Also, Live Migration can now optionally compress the data on the current Hyper-V host, send compressed data across the LAN and then decompress it at target host.  So with R2 you have three options to perform VM Live Migration traditional, SMB direct or compressed.
  • Hyper-V IO limits – Hyper-V hosts can now limit the amount of IOPS consumed by each VM.  This can be hierarchically controlled providing increased flexibility. For example one can identify a group of VMs and have a IO limit for the whole group, but each individual VM can also have an IO limit, and the group limit can be smaller than the sum of the individual VM limits.
  • Hyper-V supports VSS backup for Linux VMs – Windows Server 2012 R2 has now added support for non-application consistent VSS backups for Linux VMs.
  • Hyper-V Replica Cascade Replication – In Windows Server 2012, Hyper V replicas could be copied from one data center to another. But now with R2 those replicas at a secondary site can be copied to a third, cascading the replication from the first to the second and then the third data center, each with their own replication schedule.
  • Hyper-V VHDX file resizing – With Windows Server 2012 R2 VHDX file sizes can now be increased or reduced for both data and boot volumes.
  • Hyper-V backup changes – In previous generations of Windows Server, Hyper-V backups took two distinct snapshots, one instantaneously and the other at quiesce time and then the two were merged together to create a “crash consistent” backup. But with R2, VM backups only take a single snapshot reducing overhead and increasing backup throughput substantially.
  • NVME support – Windows Server 2012 R2 now ships with a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVME) driver for PCIe flash storage.  R2’s new NVME driver has been tuned for low latency and high bandwidth and can be used for non-clustered storage spaces to improve write performance (in a Spaces write-back cache?).
  • CSV memory read-cache – Windows Server 2012 R2 can be configured to set aside some host memory for a CSV read cache.  This is different than the Spaces Write-Back cache.  CSV caching would operate in conjunction with any other caching done at the host OS or elsewhere.

That’s about it. Some of the MVPs had a preview of R2 up in Redmond, but all of this was to be announced in TechEd, New Orleans, this week.

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Image: Microsoft TechEd by BetsyWeber