Build Your own DIY home lab Part 2: The “Server Room”

So a while ago i started on a blog post series i had hoped to be able to update with you on a regular basis. That did not happen as the new job was quite hectic and i was not able to get the funding i needed for the new S2D lab. So i ended up getting the old HP DL380 G6 servers from my then old job.

After the Nordic Infrastructure Conference i was approached by a company about a new exciting new job working on S2D, VMM, SCOM and Azure Stack as main focus. After some interview’s  i decided to join CTGlobal which i started with in April. So now i thought it was time to revive this series. Since then my S2D cluster has been running very good. Upgrading it to Insider Build 17083 which is the last Insider Build that is supported on VMM 1801. New blog post cumming as soon as the VMM team releases a build for RS5 Windows Server 2019.

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Unable to Bare Metal Deploy new S2D host from VMM with both physical Mellanox nic

4 weeks ago i started my new job at CTGlobal here in Norway. Where i will be focusing on S2D, VMM, OMS, Azure Stack and other datacenter solutions. As we are deploying S2D with VMM we wanted to build an easy to use but robust way of configuring VMM and deploy the physical hosts for S2D and configure them all the way til we create the cluster and enable S2D. Deploying the host require BMC deep discovery of the host. It detects everything from disks, controller, network cards and so on. In my home lab i have Mellanox CX3 cards and are using them for host mgmt and SMB, so i am using a setSwitch with this. And configured this in the script.

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How to bring your 2 node S2D cluster back up when witnes share is gone

So a client had patched there 2 node S2D cluster this Sunday. When the 2nd node came up it would not join the cluster. So the client started troubleshooting, without realizing that the Quorum file share Witness was not working. Someone had managed to delete the folder where the File Share Witness was on. At first, the first node that was patched and booted was working. But at some point both nodes where booted over and over again.

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Build Your own DIY home or lab Storage Spaces Direct Cluster orderd from ebay Part 1

So i built a 2 node S2D cluster  a while ago at home on some old HP G6 nodes i got cheap. But have decided to get rid of that and setup a new 3 node cluster with bit’s i can find on ebay. And reuse disks i have. This will be a multipart blog post as the parts are orderd and they come in. And during the build process. I will provide a step by step guide in building it, installing, configuring, monitoring and troubleshooting Storage Spaces Direct. Including switch config.

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