Unsolved S2D in my VMware lab?

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Hello ITPro! So I just sat through the S2D class for 70-740 exam prep and it totally blew me away. I immediately ran to my lab and tried to get this going. I've got like 3 hours wrapped up into it now and am not having any luck. So I have a cluster built with two Datacenter 2016 servers. I added two additional virtual hard drives each 40Gb in size. Attempted to enable S2D for the cluster and I get this error:

In looking at the drives a bit more closely I see this:

I have been following this article and made the necessary changes to the VMX file as well as deployed the drives and thick like suggested. I was interested in testing the 2 node mirror option for VMs. In cloud scenarios...

https://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/build-a-microsoft-storage-spaces-direct-cluster-using-vmware-virtual-machines/

What am I missing?

I am running ESXi 6.5..

Regards,
Adam Tyler

Adam,

The technology is pretty cool and I can see why you would want to give it a try.

Let's see what we can do to help you out. I have seen a few issues with this particular configuration in the wild as I have done this for some of my customers and students to test out various solutions.

Using the article that you are attempting to follow by Luca, and without being able to see your environment and do a little investigating to eliminate some obvious issues, I am going to offer you some guesses, and you will have to work on eliminating them one by one till you hopefully find the right one and are able to move forward.

The instructions that Luca provides are good, but there may be a few gaps based on what you have "under the hood".

First, the line up near the top of the article where he has you modify the VMware vmx file: scsi1:0.virtualSSD = 1

You may want to try making the designation virtualHDD instead and see of that helps. I have seen this become an issue if the physical disks are HDD and not SSD.

Second, the error in PowerShell initially seems to indicate that no disks with supported controller are found. This points to the controller configuration / choice as being the culprit.

Luca indicates that all 4 disks need to be connected to a dedicated SCSI controller, that is configured with Physical SCSI Bus Sharing and has a picture of how his setup is configured.


I assume based on your comments that you have checked this config and that it is setup properly, but I would check again, as this may be the area where the problem is.

Also, these disks must be Thick Provisioned EAGER zeroed, not LAZY zeroed, and that can also be easy to miss if you were not careful.

Start with the items above, as I think one or more of them are probably the issue.

In addition, there are some other cool and interesting ways to get this done as well if you want to branch out a little bit.

Check these solutions out also:

1. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/clustering/2017/02/14/deploying-an-iaas-vm-guest-clusters-in-microsoft-azure/

2. https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Building-Storage-Spaces-a0436d4e

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

On # 3, make sure that you check out the discussion about being able to do this on Server Core, which would be a good option.

Be in touch if what I suggested above does or does not help out, and I'll be happy to discuss some other things with you if these do not work.

Good luck !!

Cheers,

Adam

Mr. Gordon, thanks for your quick reply!

Yes, I did use the ".virtualHDD = 1" option within the VMX as I do not have SSD drives installed into the server. Speaking of the server, this happens to be an HP DL360 G7 server with a p420i RAID controller. It has 4 physical drives that are in a RAID 10 array presented to the ESXi OS as a single VMFS datastore.

So, not JBOD. I guess I thought this would definitely not work for a bare metal install of Windows Server and S2D, but I thought after watching the show you could do this at the VM level and not care about the underlying storage system? The "option 2" deployment in cloud infrastructure or on premise virtualized environments.

Ps.. I also did use Thick provisioned eager.

I notice I am using the VMware paravirtual scsi controller within the VM, I will try and switch that back to the LSI default and see what I get.

Regards,
Adam Tyler

So as is the way with IT, persistence and patience over skill gets you there. I finally got this working. I think my biggest problem was that I didn't follow the article exactly. I had actually built the cluster through the GUI initially rather than running the PowerShell commands.. Only other difference I can think of is that I never installed the File Services role like the article suggested.. Anyhow, I went back and blew up the cluster and ran through the article again exactly. One command had changed completely since it was posted...

Reference article:
https://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/build-a-microsoft-storage-spaces-direct-cluster-using-vmware-virtual-machines/

Command difference:
Article says to run:

Enable-ClusterS2D -CacheMode Disabled -AutoConfig:0 -SkipEligibilityChecks

Actually had to run:

Enable-ClusterS2D -AutoConfig:0 -SkipEligibilityChecks
set-ClusterStorageSpacesDirect -CacheState Disabled

For Reference:
I am running Server 2016 10.0.14.393 N/A Build 14393

I'm not sure if that set command actually does the same thing as the above "-CacheMode" switch, but it doesn't seem to be supported any longer on my build.

So, S2D lab built, only one problem... Well one problem and one question... First, there's this...

I am able to build new volumes manually with commands like this:

New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool01 -FriendlyName Volume2 -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 1 -FileSystem CSVFS_ReFS -Size 10Gb

I don't really get the redundancy setting above. No idea what 1 vs another number would do. Need to research more.

Also not sure why the GUI things the pool isn't configured correctly. So this is unsupported Microsoft territory then? Can't use Storage Spaces Direct in this manner at the guest and call Microsoft if there is a problem?

We use a replication technology for DR purposes that simply doesn't support volumes that aren't in a VMDK file. So I haven't been able to use Windows Clustering yet. Would really be cool not to patch things at midnight.

~
Another question. Can you not use an S2D volume as a witness disk?! why!?

Regards,
Adam Tyler