This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

Many storage challenges focus on correlating high-level uses of data (such as applications) with the nuts and bolts of storage infrastructure. These discussions often revolve around the conflict between data management, which demands an ever-smaller unit of management, and storage management, which benefits most from consolidation. Developing data management capability that is both granular enough for applications and scalable enough for storage is one key to the future of storage.

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Although it’s been available for a while now, Windows Server 2008’s storage changes aren’t widely reported. TechTarget’s Dave Raffo wrote a piece about it today, Windows Server 2008’s hidden storage features, including some quotes from me, but it’s still less than clear.

So let me sum up:

1. Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 is probably the biggest news.  Microsoft re-worked this protocol for Vista and 2008 to reduce chattiness, combine multiple commands in a single packet, and allow larger packets.  This should improve performance for just about everyone, but is only in those two operating systems right now.
2. The excellent multi-path I/O (MPIO) driver from Microsoft is also included right out of the box, including device-specific modules for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel.  This is the first version of Windows to come with MPIO, though it’s available with the iSCSI initiator and OEM drivers for other versions.
3. As in Vista, Server 2008 allows you to shrink NTFS filesystems on the fly.  It’s not quite as flexible or forgiving as some third-party tools, but it’s certainly easy to use!  Just go into the disk administrator snap-in and try it for yourself.
4. Windows finally has the option to leave new LUNs alone instead of trying to mount them.  This was one of those things that gave Windows a rep as a bad neighbor in SAN environments.
5. NTBackup is gone, replaced by a new Server Backup MMC snap-in.  I haven’t tried it, but I hope it’s better than the one that comes in Vista!  I ended up keeping NTBackup around on my laptop…
6. A new MMC snap-in called Storage Explorer lets you manage WMI-compliant SAN devices.
7. The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and DFS interfaces are improved and are now scriptable.
8. Server 2008 now automatically aligns filesystem boundaries with storage, which was one of those dark and secret skills us storage guys used to share amongst ourselves.  This can increase performance in high-I/O environments.
9. NTFS (in both Server 2008 and Vista) now has symbolic link support, just like UNIX and Mac OS X.  Note that this got mangled in the TechTarget article.
10. NTFS was also tuned and tweaked a bit for better stability and crash recovery.

VMware just released Update 2 for VMware ESX Server 3.5 (Virtual Infrastructure), and it includes some storage fixes of note:

1. Support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for filesystems Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 guests.  This means VMware services like VCB and SRM can now signal Windows Server to quiesce filesystems before creating a clone or snapshot and is a major addition!
2. Windows Server 2003 guests also get application quiescing, where supported.
3. You can now extend a live, running VMFS volume as storage is added, just like Windows Vista and 2008 guests could already do with raw device mode (RDM).  Note that this only works for flat disks with no persistent snapshots open.

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Imagine there was someone many people loved to hate, but grudgingly loved just the same because of their incredible prowess. In Red Sox Nation, that would be Alex Rodriguez, who we follow year after year with a mix of admiration, envy, and anger as he seems to make all the right moves for the wrong team. Lots of IT people feel the same about Microsoft, whose runaway success is only slightly tempered by occasional schadenfreude when a misstep is made. In our little corner of the world, storage pros have even more reason to wonder how Microsoft can continue to make good move after good move.

It wasn’t always like this - be thankful if you don’t remember FTEDIT! But ever since Windows 2000, Redmond has made improvement after improvement, remaking “bad (SAN) citizen” Windows into Martha Stewart. But unlike the latter, Microsoft hasn’t called much attention to its skills, and this is a shame…

Take iSCSI - Microsoft was an early supporter of the protocol, releasing an excellent software iSCSI driver as a free download. They also bundle a limited (but continuously-improving) volume manager with all modern versions of Windows. Then there’s VSS, which is the first hardware-independent (even hardware-free!) snapshot API I know of. I’ve written articles (1, 2) on Windows storage technologies which go into these in more detail.

But one question that came up in my virtualization seminar made me realize that I forgot one key piece of Gates-tech: MPIO. See, Microsoft has also been bundling a free hardware-independent multipath I/O driver in server editions of Windows since 2003, but lots of folks haven’t gotten the memo. It’s good stuff: A generic driver with device-specific modules (DSMs) for different storage array and network types. MPIO handles transparent multi-path failover (for availability) and load balancing (for performance).

If you have iSCSI, you simply must try MPIO since Microsoft’s own free DSM supports about everything you need, and compatibility is required for logo support. And if you’re on Fibre Channel, you’re probably in luck, too, since most major vendors provide DSMs for their arrays (but some might not be free, I’m told).

So there you have it. Another excellent (and free!) Microsoft product that you (probably) never heard of, cutting out proprietary solutions (at least for Windows Server…)

I’ve said before that Microsoft’s work in the field of enterprise storage was truly remarkable. Every other operating system vendor, as well as the grubby hordes developing Linux and BSD, should be ashamed that the “evil empire” beat them to the punch with great storage ideas like VSS, VDS, and transportable backup integration. Well, it seems Microsoft is changing the SAN landscape in another way - the Simple SAN initiative.

Although most folks haven’t heard about it, Simple SAN is Redmond’s way to force vendors to improve interoperability and ease of installation for networked SAN storage, whether it is Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Continue Reading »