Microsoft Azure AZ-800 — Section 19: Configure Windows Server storage Part 4

149. Configure Storage Quality of Service (QoS)

So the next feature I’d like to talk about is a feature known as storage que os.

Now, if you’re not familiar with QC, that’s quality of service. And pretty much anytime you hear that in it, it’s going to be related to prioritization of something, whether it’s network bandwidth or, in our case, storage.

So storage quality service is something we can use in conjunction with virtual machines to help control the amount of bandwidth that they’re consuming in IOPS. That’s input outputs per second.

So the first thing I encourage you to do is to monitor the performance of your virtual machines. You could do that through performance monitor if you right click your start button and go to computer management, right? You can then go here, underperformance performance monitor, click a little plus sign and from there, if you look for if you’ve got Hyper-V.

So, we’re doing this on the Hyper-V machine, right? So just kind of scroll through there and you’re going to look for your storage device. And then from there you can do maximum ISO ray minimum audio rate. And you can add like all instances of all the hard drives and kind of get a feel for, you know what, what you’ve got going on course. I don’t really have much going on in my virtual machines or kind of just idle. But ultimately, though, in the real world, you can monitor your virtual machines and kind of get an idea of if one virtual machine is consuming a lot more input outputs per second than another. Because unfortunately, by default, with virtualization, it’s first come, first serve.

So you might have one virtual machine that’s really hogging the storage performance of a machine.

So let me show you now how we can sort of remedy that problem.

So, let’s say that N.Y.C. Server one was consuming a lot of IOPS. I could right click the server, go to settings, expand under the hard drive here that’s doing it, and then click on quality of service. I can click Enable and I can set a minimum and maximum here.

OK, so, If if I want to set my maximum to like, let’s say, 600 IOPS, I could then hit apply. And I’ve now basically turn that all. I mean, if I want to do the same thing with my other one, you can do the same thing there. Of course, one thing you need to figure out is you need to research what kind of physical drives you’ve got in the server and determine what kind of IOPS it can handle. And then based on that, you’ll know how much IOPS you may want to designate for your physical for your main operating system, and then you can designate what you want for the virtual machines to utilize. But this basically where you would do that at all, right? And that is how you can configure storage quality servers now also say you could do this with PowerShell as well. There, there are some PowerShell commands that can essentially do this, like if you own write a script or something like that, you could write a script that will will let you define what that is. And there’s a little command called New -Storage Curious Policy. You can set a what’s called a little policy. And from there, you could apply that to whichever you want. All right.

So essentially, you can do the same thing with PowerShell as you can through the graphical tool, but it’s nice to, you know, there’s a lot of things that we have to use PowerShell for. This nice that we can actually do it to the graphical tool for once. But hopefully that gives you an understanding now of how we can enable storage quality service on our virtual machines with their virtual hard.

150. Understanding file systems

It’s now time to talk about foul systems in Windows Server, so Windows Server supports four different file systems FAT32, exFAT, NTFS and RTFM. We’re going to take a deeper look now at each one of these, So, we’re going to start with FAT32 now. FAT32 was kind of a follow up file system to the original fat that was created in the 1970s. And then eventually, as we got into the late 90s, Microsoft released what is called FAT32. FAT32 allows us to have a bigger volume size than than what we originally got with Fat 16, which was only about two gigabytes worth of space.

OK. There was also a fat 12, which was four floppy disk, but FAT32. Let us have a maximum of two terabytes in volume size, and it’s really built for removable media these days. That’s what we usually use it for is not a lot of other uses for it. Other than that, the great thing about FAT32 is it’ll work with pretty much any type of removable media based system and any operating system out there.

So, including Linux, for example, I can take a Windows formatted flash drive, plug it into Linux with no problem using FAT32.

OK.

So, it’s that’s one of the biggest reasons why people even care about FAT32.

Nowadays, it’s got less overhead, too.

So as far as performance goes, it’s a little bit better performance and you’re going to get with NTFS RDF s ultimately. But the last fact is there’s a major drawback. There’s no real security to it. You don’t get to set any kind of permissions. There’s no compression support. You can support zip files and all that which you can’t support what’s called NTFS file compression. And of course, you don’t get encryption with it to either, which is a downside as well.

So you do. You can support what’s called share permissions if you create a shared folder on one of those. But it’s not really a lot of good reasons to ever use a FAT32 volume on a server.

So then you have exFAT, OK, Zach can support up to in its extended file allocation Table. It can support up to 127 peTabytes.

So that’s that’s what comes after terabytes, right? It is a proprietary and patented filesystem, although basically what that means is if companies generate usable, utilize equipment that supports exFAT, they have to pay royalties to Microsoft. But for the most part, Microsoft has opened this up to support some Linux files. Linux operating systems and all that as well. It’s for Windows XP and higher, although you do have to have some of the later service packs and all that on XP to support it. God forbid, if you’re still using XP, but still then you have optimized. It’s optimized for flash drives as well, So, it’s built again for flash drives. Anything above the two terabyte mark that you could get with FAT32, you would want to use exFAT for that. The other thing is it does have better performance than what you get with FAT32 on larger volumes. Ultimately, the fact the file allocation Table based file systems really won’t. You don’t want to use those on drives inside of a server there again, mostly for external media removal media.

OK, so then we have NTFS. NTFS is a new technology file system. The original India first came out in like 1993.

So, it’s not all that new anymore, although they did build it to be upgraded along with your operating systems and service packs and all that.

So NTFS has gotten better over the years. Can support up to 16 exabytes. That’s what comes after peTabyte uses transaction logs, which is kind of a neat little feature that’s behind the scenes of NTFS that keeps track of changes that are happening to the file system. This to try to help prevent corruption. If the system was to be shut down unexpectedly, it’s not a guarantee. It’s not as good as resilient file system that we’re about to look at. But it does. It does try to help in case of, you know, some kind of a power outage in stopping bad sectors from happening on the disk. This does also provide the ability to do auditing, so you can enable auditing on the file system for being able to monitor when somebody is opening a file, deleting a file, changing a file, whatever it may be, you also support NTFS file compression.

OK.

So you can press individual files or entire folder, which which compresses all the files. You also support disk quotas, which allows you to limit how much disk space somebody can use on a on a NTFS file system. And lastly, we have encrypting file system EFS that allows us to encrypt individual files if we need to. This different than BitLocker, where you’re encrypting the whole volume. This, you know, individual files.

So that’s a great feature that we’ve had for quite a while now as well. All right. NTFS For the most part, Microsoft is going to tell you that unless you’re doing some fancy storage related capabilities like storage services and all that like in a storage area network. Server, they recommend using NTFS for almost everything, and you have to really use NTFS for your operating system because RDF support that as you’re about to see.

So here it is, resilient filesystem. This the newer file system that was released. It basically supports Windows 2012 and newer you can use it in. If you had if you had an Aria fs hard drive that was for file system that was formatted on a hard drive and you plug that into a client operating system, it is supported by Windows eight and higher, although now they no longer let you set up RDF fs on a client based operating system. They weren’t doing that for a long time, and they recently deprecated that feature, so you have to set up RDF s on a server, which is really where you would use this anyway.

So, it supports up to 256 zetTabytes. Of course, that’s what comes after exabyte. All right. You get better data integrity and reduce corruption and downtime with this problem with this, because it it does a much better job at indexing and does what’s known as mirroring like you have with Raid one to try to mirror your files in case a drive fails. All right. Works great in storage spaces, and that’s really what this built for.

So to utilize with storage spaces and mirroring or parody based systems? OK. The other thing is that it actually works to fix bad sectors and corruption with files online.

So you really shouldn’t ever have to use check desk. Or at least that’s the plan. Lots of people still like to use checklists, and I believe there’s might even be reports out. There were people, so, they’ve still had to use it. But ultimately, that’s what this for is an online system.

So, when Windows is up and running, it’s going to be looking for bad, bad sectors and things like that. On this, it’s going to try to fix those.

Now there are some limitations, and this why you got it. This why Microsoft recommends using NTFS. In most cases, no one doesn’t support disk quotas, although that’s not necessarily true because you can use file server resource manager and still utilize this quotas, but you can’t use disk quotas directly on the drive by, for example, if you right click the drive letter on a resilient file system and go to properties. There’s no way you would be able to do quotas like you can on NTFS.

So there is still a way to do it, but you have to use Fossil Resource Manager to do it. It does not support ntfs compression.

Now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t support things like zip files and all that. It does just not ntfs compression, which is the by right clicking a file, going to properties and then clicking the advanced button. You don’t have an advanced button when you right click the phone, go to properties like you do on NTFS.

So that’s why you can’t do that. Same with the ifs encrypting filesystem. You don’t support that either.

OK. The other thing is we don’t support what are known as hard links. This a major factor in data deduplication. Linx allows you to basically have one copy of say, file, and then you’d be able to link to that file So, it’s not duplicated. There’s no support for booting an operating system. This one you can’t use RDF for. Like your C drive windows operating system drive.

OK. And then there’s also limitations. There are certain applications that may have problems with the resilient file system, for example, SQL Server SQL Server will run fine on RDF s, but there are certain tools that don’t support our efforts.

So the big thing there is always research whatever applications are going to be interacting with the file system and make sure that they can support ARIA first.

OK. The last thing that I want to mention here is that there’s no way that if built into the operating system to convert into first RDF s, now there are external tools you can get outside of windows like third party, but there’s no built in way to do it.

So keep that in mind. You’d have to like back all your data up, reformat the drive and then restore it.

OK. All right, so that pretty much does it now. Hopefully, you have a good understanding of just a different file systems that are supported in Windows Server.