How to build a iSCSI Target Cluster on Windows Server 2012

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 2012 Logo

In Windows Server 2012 Microsoft introduced the new iSCSI Target which is now build in to Windows Server 2012 which allows you to connect to storage presented by your Windows Server.

There are a lot of new way how you can present storage to your servers especially for Hyper-V. With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V you can use block storage like iSCSI or Fiber channel or the new introduced SMB 3.0 file storage as your shared storage for your Hyper-V Clusters. Now I am a huge fan of the new SMB 3.0 solutions which allows you to place Hyper-V virtual machines on a SMB file share, but there maybe other applications and scenarios where you need to present storage via iSCSI.

The new iSCSI Target which is build in to Windows Server 2012 is pretty cool. If you are interested to use the Windows Server 2012 iSCSI Target on a stand-alone host in your lab you should checkout my blog post: Create a Windows Server 2012 iSCSI Target Server

However if you need to run the iSCSI Target in a production environment you will have a single point of failure and in this case you should cluster your iSCSI Target. To build a iSCSI Target Cluster is pretty simple, first install all the roles on both cluster nodes. After this create a new Failover Cluster as you would with Hyper-V or other applications.

If your cluster is up and running you can now add the iSCSI Target Server role.

iscsi Target Cluster 01

Setup the iSCSI Target with a IP address and a name.

iscsi Target Cluster 02

Choose the Cluster Storage which should be used for your iSCSI Target. Later you will setup VHDs on this shared Cluster Disk.

iscsi Target Cluster 03

After you have checked the summary the iSCSI Target Server role will be created.

iscsi Target Cluster 05

The iSCSI Target Server role has been created the storage you have added to the iSCSI Target will be assigned to it.

iscsi Target Cluster Storage

The ISCSI Target Server resource will be online. It’s also highly recommended that you use multiple NICs for you hosts and also use MPIO on the machines which will connect to your iSCSI Target.

iscsi Target Cluster iSCSI Target Server Role

The iSCSI Targets have to be created back in Server Manager. Connect to the cluster node where the iSCSI Target Server is running on.

iSCSI Virtual Disk Server Manager

Select the new space where your Virtual Disk should be placed. The wizard will automatically detected the Cluster role in my case “ISCSI02″ and the volume which is attached to this role in my case “Volume E:”

iSCSI Virtual Disk 02

After this is done you have to enter the name of the this and if you don’t have one already you have to create a iSCSI Target.

You can connect multiple disks to a iSCSI Target and you can create multiple iSCSI Targets on your iSCSI Target Server, and maybe you will create even multiple iSCSI Target Server on your cluster so you can create a “static” load balancing where the Target Server 1 is running on the first host and the Target Server 2 on the second host.

Geekmania 2012 Recap

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Last Friday I had two session at Geekmania 2012, a the conference for real geeks. Together with other architects and engineers of itnetx we were presenting lot of cool stuff around Microsoft Virtualization and Systems Management at Level 400.

geekmania 2012

In my two sessions me and Philipp Witschi from itnetx talked about the new Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V features like Hyper-V Replica and in the second session I focused on Hyper-V over SMB, showing new features and possibilities of SMB 3.0.

A great thing to see was the full cinema hall (around ~120 people) during the Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 Storage session, which shows the great interested in Hyper-V.

I hope people could learn something new and enjoyed my sessions and Geekmania 2012. It was great to talk to a lot of people about the new Hypervisor.

If you enjoyed my sessions I hope you will attend my session about System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 on the Swiss TechDays during 19.11. and 20.11. in Basel.

Windows Server 2012: SMB 2.2 is now SMB 3.0

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Last September at the Build Conference, Microsoft announced a new version of SMB (Server Message Block protocol), at this time the new Version was called SMB 2.2. Now some days ago at MMS 2012 (Microsoft Management Summit 2012) Microsoft announced the new name of the next generation server operating system, Windows Server 2012.

Now with this change and the Windows Server Team announced on their blog that the new name of the Server Message Block protocol will be SMB 3.0.

I think this makes totally sence, because the Team did a lot of work and this Version of SMB is a Major release.

Some of the new function of SMB 3.0 available in Windows Server 2012:

SMB for Server Applications
Active file sharing with SMB Scale Out
Scalable, fast, and efficient storage access with SMB Direct
Fast data transfers and network fault tolerance with SMB Multichannel
VSS for SMB file shares
Transparent Failover and node fault tolerance with SMB
Secure data transfer with SMB encryption
Faster access to documents over high latency networks with SMB Directory Leasing

You can get more Information about SMB 3.0 here:

Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Cannot acces NetApp CIFS share

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

If you try to connect to a NetApp CIFS share via Windows 8 beta you may cannot access the share because of the following error:

SMB connections fail with error “Invalid Signature”

Cause:

This behavior may be due to the “Secure Negotiate” feature added to SMB 2.24 for the Windows “8″ beta release, which relies on the correct signing of error responses by all SMB 2 servers (including those supporting only protocol versions 2.0 and 2.1). Some third-party file servers do not respond with a signed error response causing the connection to fail.

Microsoft has two workrounds for this problem:

Enable signing on the third-party file server.
Disable “Secure Negotiate” on the client.

You can disable “Secure Negotiate” with the following PowerShell command:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters" RequireSecureNegotiate -Value 0 -Force

Checkout the Microsoft KB2686098

Update

Only some minutes after I released this blog post I got an anwser from Glenn Sizemore (NetApp) how you can enable SMB 2 signing on the NetApp.

ONTAP CLI:

options cifs.smb2.signing.required on

PowerShell:

ipmo DataONTAP
Connect-NaController controller
Set-NaOption cifs.smb2.signing.required off

Thanks for that.

First KTSI Project done

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Now after the something over three months I finished my first project for the 5th KTSI semester. As a project I created a overview of the Microsoft Cloud for Small and Medium sized businesses. I wrote about the big partner and customer opportunity with Windows Intune and Office 365.

After I finished the review I may will publish this document on my blog.

DirectAccess for SMB and Lab environments – Design, Step by Step and Troubleshooting Guide

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

This is a modified document which I wrote for a Microsoft Workshop at KTSI. It’s a Desgin, Step by Step and a Troubleshooting Guide for Microsoft DirectAccess. This is made for SMB or LAB environments not for Enterprise Deployments.

I hope this guide can help you deploy DirectAccess in your environment and you can enjoy DirectAccess like I do

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