Hello, my name is Kurt, I'm a senior principal engineer working with the Dell GSE Support team.
This video in demonstration follows the steps of setting up a Microsoft Azure Stack hyperconverged cluster. Using PowerShell, we're going to build and configure a two-node hyperconverged Storage Spaces Direct cluster.
Here is a graphical view of the configuration we're about to deploy. We have two AX-type nodes and a multiple-switch environment. We're using Windows Active Directory which is a requirement for this type of configuration.
So let's take a quick look at the configuration items that we're going to be working with. We start out with the Windows feature install. And we're using this particular PowerShell command for that.
Follow that up with a driver update check. And we compare that to the support matrix. Now, anything that's highlighted in green here has already been completed prior to the video.
And another item already completed is the renaming of our cluster nodes. So the next item that we deal with is a cluster test, which is a validation. We're going to be testing our cluster nodes.
We're going to check the environment for Storage Spaces Direct, and ensure that everything is set for a cluster install. Following our cluster validation, we're going to take an inventory of the physical disk on our system.
We're going to run the "Get-PhysicalDisk" command to get that information. Then we're going to create the cluster. We're going to use the "New-Cluster" command. We're going to call the cluster "S2DSystem".
We're going to use the following cluster nodes. We're going to also set a "StaticAddress" for the cluster, and we're also using the "NoStorage" and "IgnoreNetwork" switches.
These are my storage networks. Since "S2D" is not enabled at this point we want to ignore those during the creation of the cluster. After the cluster is created, we will enable Storage Spaces Direct and start using these networks.
We're also going to run some commands to get some information about what we've done up to this particular point. We're going to run some "Get" commands.
The next command changes the order of networks when it comes to live migration, and what we're doing is we're moving our management network further down in the list of networks.
As far as live migrations are concerned, this is the particular command for that. What we want to do at the end of running that command also is specifying that our migration networks use "SMB" instead of "TCP".
We're also going to work with page file settings on our two cluster nodes. Next, we set up our quorum resource here. We're using a file share witness.
So you might notice I am putting this file share on a domain controller. That is not a good security practice, but because of lab limitations I'm doing that for this particular demo.
Next we deal with SMB signing. We have a command to disable that. And for performance reasons, we want to make sure that this is disabled. The next item and the last item that we're going to configure is the spaces port timeout.
We do that through a registry change using PowerShell. Now, we want to keep in mind that this does restart our cluster node, so if we have any other production items on the server outside of our cluster, they will be affected through the restart of the system.
So we just need to be aware of that. Everything I'm covering is included in pages 12 through 21 in the "Microsoft HCI Solutions from Dell Technologies Deployment Guide".
Everything that's been completed thus far has been the installation of the operating system, the cluster nodes have been joined to the domain that I'm using, and our network configuration is utilizing a non-converged network.
We're also using a switch-enabled team. For setting that particular part up, we do have a YouTube video out there on this particular topic as well. Now let's go ahead and get into our demo.
Our first action item is to do a validation test to confirm that our cluster is ready for installation. So that command did run successfully. Here's a view of that validation report that we just ran.
All the major categories are looking really good at this point. One area that we're particularly interested in is our Storage Spaces section. Also have the validation of our network communication, which is extremely important in a cluster.
And we have verification in other areas as well as far as that validation test was concerned. So we should be ready for the install at this point. I forgot to mention earlier that I will be stopping and restarting the video as we go to keep the video moving along.
So the next command that we want to run is we want to get an inventory of the disk that we have available. This is showing the disk on my individual node.
Everything's coming back as expected at this point. We're going to go ahead and create the cluster. And the process is kicking off here. So the "New Cluster" command ran successfully.
We have the cluster that we designated, created. We want to follow that up at this point by enabling "Storage Spaces Direct". And I agree to that. So we enabled the "Storage Spaces Direct" without a problem.
And we want to go ahead and take an inventory of what's occurred up to this point. We now see our new storage pool. We're getting some information about our cluster. And this is completed by creating a report for us.
So at this point I want to go ahead and re-run that command "Get-PhysicalDisk". And this looks a little bit different than what we saw a few minutes ago. It's now showing the disk between our two cluster nodes.
And the good news is they're coming back as healthy at this point. So the next thing that we want to do is move our management network further down in the network order of live migration networks and this particular set of PowerShell commands does that.
I'm also going to run the following command to tell my live migration networks to use "SMB" versus "TCP". Once again this is important for performance considerations.
Next, we want to run the commands to reset the size of our page file, and that read as expected. The next item we want to configure is our cluster quorum.
So I'm going to run this particular command to do that, and that ran successfully. So the next thing that we want to do is disable SMP server sign-in, and we're doing this to enhance performance.
We're going to go ahead and run that command, and that ran successfully. The last configuration step that we want to make at this point is configuring "spaceport".
This is a registry setting. Once again this is also for performance. And we're going to follow that up with a restart of the system. So that registry parameter has been set.
At this point we're going to go ahead and reboot our cluster node. So node 1 has rebooted. I just wanted to come into Failover Cluster Manager to take a look at our new cluster. So we see our two nodes.
If we come down and take a look at the disk, we see the virtual disk that was created. We also have some other information related to the networks. So our cluster is available.
It's online, and it's ready for configuration. That concludes our video on building a Microsoft hyperconverged cluster using the Microsoft HCI Solutions Dell Deployment Guide. Thank you for watching.
