Storage Spaces Direct Rolling Cluster Upgrade to Windows Server 2019

I have been quite on the blog front for a while as when we got home from summer holiday in early August we had lots of water in the 2nd floor bathroom floor which had run down a crack in the floor into the living room underneath. So I have spent almost every free hour after that figuring out where the water was coming from by removing walls. And finding a lot of rot in the construction where the water came in. And the water damage in the living room also kicked off a total renovation of the living room. As the insurance does not cover everything we will need to do some stuff our self.

But today i found some time to write this blog post for you, and it’s about Upgrading your S2D cluster to 2019 🙂

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Backing up your DPM2016 Server with a 2nd DPM server

So you have a DPM server and are thinking, it could be nice to have a offsite backup of my backups.

There are 2 ways to go. You can enable the DPM Azure Cloud backup. Wich is a nice feature. But it’s more for having a longer retention of your backup. And you will need to either reinstall the DPM server or install the Azure Backup Server somewhere and connect it to the Recovery Service Vault to restore the data.

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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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Replacing a failed Disk on a storage spaces direct pool failed

So yesterday i had to replace a disk on a failed HDD in one of our S2D cluster. After replacing the drive and removing the failed drive from the cluster i ran Get-Physicaldisk and noticed i had no disks with Canpool = True. This is normal as S2D will detect the new disk and add it to the Storage Pool to balance the pool correctly.

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Dataon S2D-3212 HyperConverged Cluster

Updated 27. feb

We have been testing Storage Spaces Direct for a while on our Ebay cluster. We have been running development and some production systems. As the 2nd exchange node, a mediation server and our vmm server.

We have been looking to replace our current Hyper-V solution that consist of HP BL465c G8 and  BL490 G7 blade servers attached to HP P2000 G3 MSA over iscsi. This has been slower and slower as we have setup more virtual machines. This was a 12 disk shelf with 11 disks active with one spare. One 15k disk gives about 170 iops, giving a whopping 1870 iops on max speed. On normal load it would use about 1200-1500  IOPS so not a lot of spare IOPS. We had one pr cluster.

Most of you know what S2D(Storage Spaces Direct) is, if you don’t go look at Cosmos Darwin’s post over at Technet to get some good insight about S2D.

What i am going to focus on in this blog is the new Dataon HyperConverged server. Back at Ignite 2016  Dataon released there first offering the S2D-3110 all flash solution pumping out 2.6 Million IOPS in a 1u form factor. Read more

Setup VPN to use MFA with NPS Extension

In this blog post i will show you how to setup a Microsoft VPN connection with the new NPS Extension for Azure AD MFA.

This is new service that the Microsoft NPS team just released, that adds an Extension to the Windows Network Policy Server.

When using the NPS extension for Azure MFA, the authentication flow includes the following components:

This is copied from https://docs.microsoft.com/nb-no/azure/multi-factor-authentication/multi-factor-authentication-nps-extension

  1. NAS/VPN Server receives requests from VPN clients and converts them into RADIUS requests to NPS servers.
  2. NPS Server connects to Active Directory to perform the primary authentication for the RADIUS requests and, upon success, passes the request to any installed extensions.
  3. NPS Extension triggers a request to Azure MFA for the secondary authentication. Once the extension receives the response, and if the MFA challenge succeeds, it completes the authentication request by providing the NPS server with security tokens that include an MFA claim, issued by Azure STS.
  4. Azure MFA communicates with Azure Active Directory to retrieve the user’s details and performs the secondary authentication using a verification method configured to the user.

The following diagram illustrates this high-level authentication request flow:

Authentication flow diagram

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