Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?
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@Emad-R said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
- hearing good stuff about Windows Servers with Storage lately which is weird, should I bother installing and learning, its making buzz lately on 2016. Or should I stick with my gluster knowledge, I like to learn but i hate wasting time, and is it reliable and what filesystem does it use by default ?
There is a ton of marketing buzz. But it's a risky platform. Will shops use it? Yes, but even MS has advised against it. It's just ready for prime time. Storage has never been Microsoft's wheel house and nothing has changed. SS is just Windows Software RAID with more features. It's been bad for decades.
The question is... do you want to learn something that MS shops will deploy without checking? Or do you want to learn things that they should use if they do their research?
SS might be a good product some day. But today, it is unproven and has a bad track record. Even MS' own servers have had loads of issues with it (some big Azure outages were SS caused.)
People will use the "it worked for me" thing, which if anyone tells you that, you know that they either don't understand how reliable storage is supposed to be, or they are trying to pressure you to do something that they know isn't reliable. Statistically, SS has extremely few users (that's right from MS themselves) and those using it have statistically had way too many issues. It's just not production ready, and certainly not in 2016. The question to be answered is if in 2019 it is ready, and no one has suggested that it is yet, and you won't be able to know how good it is for years, because that's how long storage testing takes.
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What does Glances export buy you, the ability to replay?
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I wouldn't learn SS unless you plan on running Windows server with a bunch of DAS boxes and need the flexibility Windows SW RAID offers regarding that. Otherwise HW RAID is easier if using Windows.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
What does Glances export buy you, the ability to replay?
graphs and insights and logging
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@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
I wouldn't learn SS unless you plan on running Windows server with a bunch of DAS boxes and need the flexibility Windows SW RAID offers regarding that. Otherwise HW RAID is easier if using Windows.
And more mature.
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@Emad-R said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
What does Glances export buy you, the ability to replay?
graphs and insights and logging
Does the export make the graphs? Logging I already get from sysstat.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
I wouldn't learn SS unless you plan on running Windows server with a bunch of DAS boxes and need the flexibility Windows SW RAID offers regarding that. Otherwise HW RAID is easier if using Windows.
And more mature.
What year will that be? You've been saying this years already.
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@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
I wouldn't learn SS unless you plan on running Windows server with a bunch of DAS boxes and need the flexibility Windows SW RAID offers regarding that. Otherwise HW RAID is easier if using Windows.
And more mature.
What year will that be? You've been saying this years already.
It doesn't start maturing UNTIL it is production ready. Once it is production ready (which hasn't happened yet) THEN it will need a minimum of three years global, broad, heavy production use to be considered minimally mature. Anyone uses it between hitting production ready and that point would be an early adopted.
I've been saying this for a long time, because it's a critical part of the process that hasn't started yet. And more and more looks like it might never.
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@Emad-R said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
I know 2 unrelated topics, but wanted your feedback.
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hearing good stuff about Windows Servers with Storage lately which is weird, should I bother installing and learning, its making buzz lately on 2016. Or should I stick with my gluster knowledge, I like to learn but i hate wasting time, and is it reliable and what filesystem does it use by default ?
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Anyone is using glances system monitoring tool with exporting and where do you export and do you have easy guide cause I am loving it, but there is many options to export too and tie too, so what is the better one with good web dashboard. (but you can run glances -w, okay but I would lose the data if i am not looking at it)
thanks in advance
1: We've been building clustered Storage Spaces converged (asymmetric) clusters with two or more compute nodes and one or more shared SAS JBODs since 2012 pre-release bits and have had great success with them.
Our smallest asymmetric cluster client is a 15-18 seat accounting firm while our largest that uses a disaggregate Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) cluster that runs on Storage Spaces and a Hyper-V compute cluster that runs VMs into the thousands for their tenants/customers.
Lately, we've been deploying Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) in both Hyper-Converged (HCI) and SOFS only deployments.
Contrary to the naysayers we've done quite well and so have many others including Tier 1.
2: Not here.
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@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
Contrary to the naysayers we've done quite well and so have many others including Tier 1.
The naysayers NEVER suggest that the issues will happen to everyone, that's not how risk works - so there is no contrary here. This exactly the "it works for me" issue that had already been mentioned. Stating that it "does work for some people" highlights a misunderstanding of risk.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/14750/ask-your-mom-to-explain-risk
If you understand how risk works, and understand that for production storage we need things like seven nines durability or higher, than you know that even knowing hundreds of companies where it works tells us essentially nothing. And it is Microsoft themselves who said it wasn't really ready and wasn't being used by a statistically useful number of production installs.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
Contrary to the naysayers we've done quite well and so have many others including Tier 1.
The naysayers NEVER suggest that the issues will happen to everyone, that's not how risk works - so there is no contrary here. This exactly the "it works for me" issue that had already been mentioned. Stating that it "does work for some people" highlights a misunderstanding of risk.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/14750/ask-your-mom-to-explain-risk
If you understand how risk works, and understand that for production storage we need things like seven nines durability or higher, than you know that even knowing hundreds of companies where it works tells us essentially nothing. And it is Microsoft themselves who said it wasn't really ready and wasn't being used by a statistically useful number of production installs.
We've had this discussion before on many different topics and at this point I am of the opinion that we shall need to agree to disagree.
We have six to seven years of deploying Storage Spaces, Hyper-V, and now Storage Spaces Direct clusters. I'd be more than happy to chat about the what/where/how of what we do. @Emad-R DM me.
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@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
Contrary to the naysayers we've done quite well and so have many others including Tier 1.
The naysayers NEVER suggest that the issues will happen to everyone, that's not how risk works - so there is no contrary here. This exactly the "it works for me" issue that had already been mentioned. Stating that it "does work for some people" highlights a misunderstanding of risk.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/14750/ask-your-mom-to-explain-risk
If you understand how risk works, and understand that for production storage we need things like seven nines durability or higher, than you know that even knowing hundreds of companies where it works tells us essentially nothing. And it is Microsoft themselves who said it wasn't really ready and wasn't being used by a statistically useful number of production installs.
We've had this discussion before on many different topics and at this point I am of the opinion that we shall need to agree to disagree.
We have six to seven years of deploying Storage Spaces, Hyper-V, and now Storage Spaces Direct clusters. I'd be more than happy to chat about the what/where/how of what we do. @Emad-R DM me.
No one is doubting that you've done it for a while, nor that you've had good results. What I'm trying to say is that even if SS was horribly dangerous, you still expect to find lots of people for whom it has worked. That you've had good experiences, even quite a few, over a long period of time, doesn't tell us that it's safe, or even imply such. It simply states that it is "capable of working." It doesn't make it bad, either. It just doesn't give us anything useful for statistics.
It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday. Sixteen years it "worked fine." Using math, we knew what they did was dangerous, but from observation you'd easily say "yeah, but it has protected us for SO long, how can it be bad?" Then, when it finally failed, it was clear that it was the IPOD design that caused the failure, exactly as it was most likely to do so. And we could show that in that specific scenario, skipping the IPOD would alone have protected them.
It's not that I'm disagreeing with your experience. It's that I'm stating how that experience applies to risk math.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.
What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?
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@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.
What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?
Server maintenance must be performed in any case. An IPOD or a single server still has this requirement. But with an IPOD maintenance could introduce issues that you wouldn't see with a single server.
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Maintenance is just that, maintenance. But IPODs introduce complexity for often little to no gain.
A single host while still requiring maintenance has much fewer pieces that need to be maintained. Thus reducing the risk that performing maintenance causes an issue that would be unexpected.
IE A firmware update on your Switch breaks iSCSI connections.
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@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.
What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?
They were SO scared of the system's complexity that they avoided maintaining it. And the system did NOT provide full true redundancy, so had to be taken offline for some maintenance anyway.
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@DustinB3403 said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.
What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?
Server maintenance must be performed in any case. An IPOD or a single server still has this requirement. But with an IPOD maintenance could introduce issues that you wouldn't see with a single server.
The IPOD also required much more maintenance.
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@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.
What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?
In a cluster setting (SOFS) this is a moot point since nodes can be patched and rebooted without any downtime.
We deploy traditional RAID in standalone settings not Storage Spaces.
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@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.
What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?
In a cluster setting (SOFS) this is a moot point since nodes can be patched and rebooted without any downtime.
Including the SOFS nodes, you mean. That's the important part. It fixes the single maintenance point of the SAN.
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@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:
It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.
What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?
In a cluster setting (SOFS) this is a moot point since nodes can be patched and rebooted without any downtime.
Including the SOFS nodes, you mean. That's the important part. It fixes the single maintenance point of the SAN.
You'd need S2D (or similar tech, like SW vSAN) to get around the single maintenance point of SAN / DAS.
