Hi, I am currently working on a POC for implementing DFS in our company (I know kind of late getting on the wagon) and I have done quite a lot of reading and searching about it.

We are looking at leveraging it for both the Namespace and replication aspect of the it within a company of +/- 5000 employees and sites all across Canada from coast to coast.

We are looking to start rather small but once I have shown the beauty of the product I expect this to flourish into a norm when thinking of installing a File server anywhere.

My question is do I need to implement a Namespace server or can I configure the shares and replications on each server that will be using it then having the tool install on my laptop to administer all these changes?

thank you and all help is welcomed.

Hi! Some kind of strange behavior occurred while using our 4-nodes S2D cluster.  After some connectivity problems (nic teaming bug or, maybe, something else) cluster shutted down, storage pool became "Unhealthy", Operational status "Read only", Reason - "Majority Disks unhealthy" with all Physical Disks "OK" and "Healthy" status. Storage Enclosures and Storage Subsystem are Healthy as well. December commulative update was installed, servers rebooted many times, Cluster and pool were shutted down and brought up again - all with no luck. Logs:

Get-StoragePool S2D | fl *


Usage                             : Other
OperationalStatus                 : Read-only
HealthStatus                      : Unhealthy
ProvisioningTypeDefault           : Fixed
SupportedProvisioningTypes        : Fixed
MediaTypeDefault                  : Unspecified
ReadOnlyReason                    : By Policy
RepairPolicy                      : Parallel
RetireMissingPhysicalDisks        : Never
WriteCacheSizeDefault             : Auto
Version                           : Windows Server 2016
FaultDomainAwarenessDefault       : StorageScaleUnit
ObjectId                          : {1}\\WSFC4-LEN\root/Microsoft/Windows/Storage/Providers_v2\SPACES_StoragePool.ObjectId="{b882b9f2-798d-436c-8de1-3b4f3e9f9498}:SP:{a251c59e-af1b-446a-b77e-756441ad082b}"
PassThroughClass                  :
PassThroughIds                    :
PassThroughNamespace              :
PassThroughServer                 :
UniqueId                          : {a251c59e-af1b-446a-b77e-756441ad082b}
AllocatedSize                     : 20195473096704
ClearOnDeallocate                 : False
EnclosureAwareDefault             : False
FriendlyName                      : S2D
IsClustered                       : True
IsPowerProtected                  : False
IsPrimordial                      : False
IsReadOnly                        : False
LogicalSectorSize                 : 4096
Name                              :
OtherOperationalStatusDescription :
OtherUsageDescription             :
PhysicalSectorSize                : 4096
ResiliencySettingNameDefault      : Mirror
Size                              : 22383222063104
SupportsDeduplication             : True
ThinProvisioningAlertThresholds   : {70}
WriteCacheSizeMax                 : 18446744073709551614
WriteCacheSizeMin                 : 0
PSComputerName                    :
CimClass                          : ROOT/Microsoft/Windows/Storage:MSFT_StoragePool
CimInstanceProperties             : {ObjectId, PassThroughClass, PassThroughIds, PassThroughNamespace...}
CimSystemProperties               : Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimSystemProperties

Get-PhysicalDisk

FriendlyName         SerialNumber       CanPool OperationalStatus HealthStatus Usage           Size
------------         ------------       ------- ----------------- ------------ -----           ----
Intel Raid 1 Volume  OS                 False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select   130 GB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMEVB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMHKB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMKNB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMK1B           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDM0BB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
ATA INTEL SSDSC2BX40 BTHC536304DC400VGN False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 372.5 GB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMDBB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMJBB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDM1BB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
ATA INTEL SSDSC2BX40 BTHC536502K0400VGN False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 372.5 GB
ATA INTEL SSDSC2BX40 BTHC536603VB400VGN False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 372.5 GB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDM2LB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
ATA INTEL SSDSC2BX40 BTHC536603WQ400VGN False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 372.5 GB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMKPB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMETB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMGSB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
ATA INTEL SSDSC2BX40 BTHC536603UZ400VGN False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 372.5 GB
ATA INTEL SSDSC2BX40 BTHC53660476400VGN False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 372.5 GB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDM0MB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDMJ2B           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDM0HB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
ATA INTEL SSDSC2BX40 BTHC53660460400VGN False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 372.5 GB
HGST HUC101812CSS204 06VDM2NB           False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select  1.09 TB
ATA INTEL SSDSC2BX40 BTHC536306R6400VGN False   OK                Healthy      Auto-Select 372.5 GB

Get-VirtualDisk | fl *


Usage                             : Other
NameFormat                        :
OperationalStatus                 : Detached
HealthStatus                      : Unknown
ProvisioningType                  :
AllocationUnitSize                :
MediaType                         :
ParityLayout                      :
Access                            : Read/Write
UniqueIdFormat                    : Vendor Specific
DetachedReason                    : Majority Disks Unhealthy
WriteCacheSize                    : 1073741824
FaultDomainAwareness              :
ColumnIsolation                   :
ObjectId                          : {1}\\WSFC4-LEN\root/Microsoft/Windows/Storage/Providers_v2\SPACES_VirtualDisk.ObjectId="{b882b9f2-798d-436c-8de1-3b4f3e9f9498}:VD:{a251c59e-af1b-446a-b77e-756441ad082b}{3032d188-054f-4fba-b914-973b70d0c773}"
PassThroughClass                  :
PassThroughIds                    :
PassThroughNamespace              :
PassThroughServer                 :
UniqueId                          : 88D132304F05BA4FB914973B70D0C773
AllocatedSize                     : 10093173145600
FootprintOnPool                   : 20188493774848
FriendlyName                      : MIXED_FOR_VMs
Interleave                        :
IsDeduplicationEnabled            : False
IsEnclosureAware                  :
IsManualAttach                    : True
IsSnapshot                        : False
IsTiered                          : True
LogicalSectorSize                 : 4096
Name                              :
NumberOfAvailableCopies           :
NumberOfColumns                   :
NumberOfDataCopies                :
NumberOfGroups                    :
OtherOperationalStatusDescription :
OtherUsageDescription             :
PhysicalDiskRedundancy            :
PhysicalSectorSize                : 4096
ReadCacheSize                     : 0
RequestNoSinglePointOfFailure     : False
ResiliencySettingName             :
Size                              : 10093173145600
UniqueIdFormatDescription         :
PSComputerName                    :
CimClass                          : ROOT/Microsoft/Windows/Storage:MSFT_VirtualDisk
CimInstanceProperties             : {ObjectId, PassThroughClass, PassThroughIds, PassThroughNamespace...}
CimSystemProperties               : Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimSystemProperties

We have recently moved a file server from 2008 R2 to 2012 R2 and are experience very bad Windows Search results. I have Windows Search installed on the file server and have indexed the contents (over 1 million files). What I have found is if I search for our specific test file in the parent directory it will not return all the results. For example we search "withdraw" and it missing things like "withdraw v3", "withdraw v2", and other variations. 

However if I go into a subfolder that the file may be in (or within child folders of that subfolder) then it finds it. Some of these files I am talking about could be 6 levels deep on the file system.

I have already tried rebuilding the index and third party search tools find it without any issues. Is there some sort of limitation I am not aware about?

The server is 2012 R2 and the workstations are Windows 7 Pro. We do use DFS but I have tried mapping a drive to the share directly and it does the same.

Hello,

I have encountered an error when I wanted to create a volume on initialised disk (doesn't matter if it is MBR or GPT) that is connected through iSCSI from our SAN (QSAN P300Q-D316).

If I create a disk on the SAN with block size of 64K (so far I have notices it happens on anything more than 4K), stripe height 64K assign it a LUN and then try to initialise it with 64K allocation unit, it will end on a try of formatting the partition and assigning it a drive letter (both actions fails), Virtual Disk Service quits unexpectedly and is unresponsive with error on RPC (even after restart). Disk part doesn't work either.

Any suggestions?

Many thanks,

JAK

I've created a SMB-Quick Share from my file sharing server which has the folder name in all uppercase letters, the share name is in all uppercase letters, and even the path name I gave in all uppercase letters but when I go to the network share the shared folders name is all lowercase. 

How can I get the shared folders name to display uppercase?

(Running Windows Server 2016)

Brian Hoyt

Hi there!

Hope you all are doing great in your respective locations?

I noticed recently that the my Administrator login account (built-in) disappears from my Windows server 2008 r2 screen. I logged in with a user account that belong to administrator group but I could not see the files on the desktop that I saved when I logged in with Admin.

Please help me out with this issue. How do I ensure that the administrator login does not disappears again???

I will be grateful.

While my Windows 10 machine (i.e. same as Server 2016 in that aspect) was doing it's TieringEngineService task I saw in Process Hacker it is reading and writing to:

<tiered-storage-driveletter>System Volume Information\Heat\NoLog\TieringHeatData.db

But google, bing and duckgogo are not my friend here. There is practically NO information at all about and TieringHeatData.db. Not even sysinternals tools or anything. What it contains is obvious. But isn't there a tool which gives more information about that, and more tiering-statistics? In case of Server 2016/2012 it would be great to see in the heatmap whether the SSD's and the amount of actually hot data match, or whether they are too too small and therefore too slow. It is also important to see how it changes, if the amount of hot data gets more and more so I can act before the SSDs get too small.

I'm rebuilding/reconfiguring a storage pool layout under Server 2016.  It had a parity storage space, which I migrated the data off of and removed, and have also marked several disks in the pool as retired.

I then initiated an Optimize-StoragePool command against the pool, and in another window, initiated a Get-StorageJob to check on the commands.

This is what I see:

Name      IsBackgroundTask ElapsedTime JobState PercentComplete BytesProcessed BytesTotal
----      ---------------- ----------- -------- --------------- -------------- ----------
Optimize  False            00:27:37    Running  0
Rebalance True             00:00:00    New      0               0              0
Repair    True             08:09:12    Running  0               0              645050400768
Repair    True             00:00:00    Running  16              1183238324224  7143577092096

What are those repair jobs, and where did they come from?  Are they automatically initiated when the other disks were marked retired? I am a bit puzzled since I don't have a parity space at this point, I was under the impression that repair commands wouldn't do much.  

And then of course, the time values don't make any sense to me, one job has no elapsed time but it 16% complete, the other has 8 hours and appears to have not done anything?  Those numbers seem switched to me, and if I subsequently run the command, BytesProcessed on the job with no ElapsedTime will have increased.

To summarize:

Where did the repair jobs come from?

What the heck is Get-StorageJobs actually telling me?

Oh, and if I end up having to reboot the machine (cleanly) while jobs are processing, what happens?

Thanks!

Hello,

I need Some advices on mounting a new Physical server to replace old one.

The old server (Windows 2008R2) was connected to a SAN and provided with 8 disks (Partitions) == has networked storage

Our project is to transfer/migrate the old server to the new one, but the new server is a standalone server (Local storage).

The new server has 6 disks with 350Go.

What I'm looking for is to configure the server with RAID5 and I will be able to create the 8 partitions.

Thank you for your help

We have successfully created a 3-Node S2D Cluster.

Roles are installed and up2date on all 3.

But if i want to share a SMB Folder, i cannot select any Server or folder. Resource manager for file servers is installed. Everything else is greyed out.

Hi,

I have a below request from customer. Here is what have been done so far. Please help. I know there will be some / lot of confusions. Let me know if more info is needed.

There is a windows 2003 cluster(two node cluster "server1" and "server2") which  has two file share cluster groups "cluster group 1" and "cluster group 2" with each having single disk assigned to them "disk1" and "disk2" respectively. There is a third non-cluster server "server 3" (windows 2012 R2). This server has 3 drives C:, D: and E: drive.

The data from "disk1" of "cluster group 1" has been copied to D: drive on third server using robocopy. Similarly data from "disk2" of "cluster group 2" has been copied to E: drive on third server.

Customer wants to stop above cluster groups. Rename the third server to "server1" and change IP (use the IP of "cluster group1"). Add additional IP (IP of "cluster group 2") on the same NIC on third server. Now customer wants to know if there is any possibility to restrict or bind these IP addresses to D: and E: drives respectively. In other words, if users access\\<first IP>, he / she should see only D: drive data. If user accesses\\<second IP>, user should see only E: drive data. This should in other words behave like cluster share access how it used to be earlier.

Is there any way to achieve this? Please help.

-Umesh.S.K

Hello everyone. I am testing out iSCSI and when I try to resize (extend) the virtual disk, I get the following error:

The specified file path or its parent virtual disk path was not found. In a failover cluster configuration, virtual
disks can only be created or imported on shared cluster disks.
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (Microsoft.Iscsi...rd errorRecord):IscsiCmdException) [Resize-IscsiVir
   tualDisk], IscsiCmdException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : *:System.IO.FileLoadException:00000000,Microsoft.Iscsi.Target.Commands.ResizeIscsiVirtua
   lDiskCommand

I typed in the following command within PowerShell: Resize-IscsiVirtualDisk -Path D:\iSCSIVirtualDisks\LUN01.vhdx -Size 4.5TB which gives me the above error.  The system is a Dell 730 with SAS attached JBOD (MD1400). It's stand alone so I'm confused as to why the error references shared cluster disks.  The server is running Windows Server 2012 R2 Core Standard.

We have a small Work Folders implementation for a few clients.

Until recently, the function has been working great, no problems.

However, we have confirmed that two recent Windows10 patches leave Work Folders broken and completely unusable for clients who have either of the patches installed.

KB3185614 (security rollup for Win10 build 1511)

KB3189866 (security rollup for Win10 build 1607)

If a Win10 client has either of these updates applied, they cannot use Work Folders.  The client attempts to connect to the Work Folders Server and gets the error:

"there was a problem finding your Work Folders server", error code 0x80072f76.

Work Folders server is fully patched.

Removing the patch will allow the client to connect and use Work Folders successfully, but as we know Windows10 will just reinstall that patch again in a few days.  We are using the Microsoft "driver update" prevention tool for now to block the patch on affected machines.

We are opening a support case with Microsoft soon.

With 2 * SSD 250Gb and 2 * HDD 2TB

using the following powershell commands:-

$PhysicalDisks = Get-StorageSubSystem -FriendlyName "Windows Storage*" | Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true
New-StoragePool -FriendlyName "CompanyData" -StorageSubsystemFriendlyName "Windows Storage*" -PhysicalDisks $PhysicalDisks -ProvisioningTypeDefault Fixed -ResiliencySettingNameDefault Mirror -WriteCacheSizeDefault 5GB
New-StorageTier -MediaType HDD -StoragePoolFriendlyName CompanyData -FriendlyName HDD_Tier
New-StorageTier -MediaType SSD -StoragePoolFriendlyName CompanyData -FriendlyName SSD_Tier
$SSD = Get-StorageTier -FriendlyName *SSD*
$HDD = Get-StorageTier -FriendlyName *HDD*
New-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName "UserData01" -StoragePoolFriendlyName CompanyData -ResiliencySettingName Mirror –StorageTiers $SSD, $HDD -StorageTierSizes 180GB, 1TB

then:-

Can anyone tell me if this is a bug? If the disks are mirrored? What I did wrong?

Hello,

I have installed FSRM on my 2012 R2 servers over a month ago and need to make a change to one of them today and could not find it on the server.  The service is running and I'm getting reports from the File Screens I setup.  FSRM.MSC does not exist on the server and if I copy it from another server it will not load the snap-in.  Why would it just go away?

Dear all, 

please forward me to the corresponding RTFM link for that problem: 

I have an AzureAD joined client computer cli1 using Windows 10 in a remote office. In Azure I have a Windows Server 2012 File Server sqlfs1 (the server is running SQL Server 2014, so using the default templates I can't use Windows Server 2016 for SQL 2014) that also provides an SMB share share1 the clients user user1 connects to. 

On the share level, the user is granted the required access, let's say "fullAccess" for now. If you do that on an on-premise server using a domain user, the user was able to access. Basically I'm trying to do the same with AzureAD and no AD DS except AAD Domain Services.

User1 connects using a point-to-site VPN connection, so she can access the file share \\sqlfs1\share1 . Unfortunately the user is prompted for credentials although user1 is on AAD and  on share1 I setup permissions. If I enter credentials manually, user1 is able to access. Saving the credential is not an option, as I have about 4,000 users to grant access.

How can I provide file services SSO to a client user that is authenticated to AzureAD, but not on a domain-joined computer?

Many thanks for your help.

Regards,
Martin

Hi, we have a domain-based DFS environment. Everything is DNS based, all domain controllers are also namespace servers. Everything is working fine but today we had to bring down a domain controller which caused some dfs namespaces to fail for some users.

I guess the problem is the DFS domain cache. When I do a dfsutil /spcinfo I only see one domain controller on a client. The domain controllers differ from client to client but there's always only one listed. If I go through the articles I notice that all domain controllers should be listed there but I can't how to investigate or how to fix this. All dfsdiag commands show no problems, not for integrity, not for domain controllers, etc.

Anyone has an idea on how to fix this domain cache list? There should be at least three domain controllers displayed.

Hello,

I've two servers that have DFS enabled. The first server is a Fileshare that replicates the dolfers to the second server, this second server is a read only server. The replication is working for a while and now we decided to add exclude a subfolder from the replication, so we went to subfolder filter and add the subfolder. 

The problem is that the folder wasn't deleted from the read-only server (second server). If i try to remove says "YOU'LL NEED TO PROVIDE ADMINISTRATOR PERMISSION TO DELETE THIS FOLDER". This folder shouldn't be removed automatically after applying the filter?

Thanks

Regards.