Can only keep one version on a network share
Cant backup to a Samba network share
It is not allowed to mix ordinary volumes with CSV volumes
And then we have the old crashes when starting and catalog must be deleted. ðŸ˜
Month: May 2021
A few years ago i built a storage server. It was supposed to provide storage for other computers. It never worked well. A few months ago i decided to find out why there was errors for clients. I found out that the powersupply to the harddrives was bad. Voltage drop in cables and not thick enough cables. I soldered some 1.5mm2 cables with SATA power connectors. It still was voltage drop. SATA power connectors are not good. You cant use one connector for current to four SAS drives. I switched to WAGO connectors. There is a small lever you pull up. Insert the cable and pull down the lever. Can handle much more current than SATA connectors. After that the storage was reliable. I still did not want to move my websites to the storage server. If i want to fix something with my webserver computer then the site would be offline. If i wanted to do something with my storage computer then the site would be offline. Every time i installed updates to the storage computer then i would have to stop all virtual machines that were using storage on the storage computer. After a while i started to think: it cant be this way they do it at datacenters. They cant tell everybody that they have to shutdown their VMs because a server needs to restart. I rent some VPS and it is running all the time. After looking and testing different things i found Windows storage spaces direct. It had lots of requirements. It looked like what i needed. Now i use it for my website. I install updates to one node. Move roles over to another node. Restart node. When it is running again i fail back roles. Then it takes a few hours for the volumes to resynchronize. Website is online all the time. Now i can get close to 100% uptime.
I bought a HP Proliant DL380P gen8 server a few days ago. It was nice and quiet before i put in a network card. Then it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I took out the network card. It was quiet again. I put in a LSI SAS card. It sounded like a vacuum cleaner again. If i put in a non HP SSD or hard drive ILO believes the drive is getting overheated. Then it turns up the fans. If it cant get the temperature out of some hardware it turns up the fans. When i was looking for a solution for this i saw that HPs reply is that this doesnt happen if you use HP parts. My Dell poweredge server handles this much better. If it detects a card in a PCIe slot it increases fan speeds a little.
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My Windows cluster is working
I had many problems getting the hyper-converged fail-over cluster to work. First i tried to convert a Windows server standard to a Server datacenter cluster node. Something went wrong. Every time i shutdown a node all volumes went offline. They should only be degraded, but still available. The slabs were placed wrong. It was like Storage spaces direct placed slabs anywhere without caring about both must not be on the same node. I started over from scratch. Wiped all drives with Linux wipefs. You cant wipe a storage space drive in Windows. This time i could shutdown a node and the volumes got only degraded. It takes a long time to re-synchronize the volumes. Next problem was that a NVME SSD was not automatically used as cache. I tried to set it as journal with a powershell command. It changed to journal, but no space was used on it. I tried to remove it and add it. Then i remember that i had a Samsung NVME SSD that was used as storage spaces direct cache in another. I removed the Kingston SSD and put in the Samsung. Immediately storage spaces direct turned it into a cache drive. I dont know why it did not like the Kingston. I noticed that writing to the cluster volumes were slow. Turns out that storage spaces direct turns off disk caches if the drives dont have Power Loss Protection. Even a NVME SSD gets slow without write cache.
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I will never buy a HP server again
Next time i will buy a Dell server instead. The HP server i bought a few days ago have the same error as the one i had before. It reads drive temp wrong. Believes the drive is overheating and turns up the fans. Some Kingston SSDs works. If i put in only one PCIe card it sounds like vacuum cleaner. Because if the card is not HP then it cant read the temp and turns up the fans. It is possible to set the raid card in HBA mode, but then it cant boot from drives connected to the card. It does not have UEFI. I have to use what is integrated in the server. I have installed Linux on USB removable drive. Disconnected the drive bays on the front and pulled a SAS cable from inside out the back of the server so i can connect some 3.5 hard drives.