Microsoft will be releasing an update to Windows Server 2012 later this year with a host of new features and enhancements – a large chunk of which are focused on Hyper-V and storage. And while a plethora of these features and enhancements are fancy and exciting, deciphering which of these new capabilities will translate to real benefits for you and your organization requires a deeper dive into each one. So before you start clicking Next>Next>Finish in the new interface, take a look at some of the top storage related capabilities and how you can benefit from them.
Top 5 Storage Features/Enhancements in Window Server 2012:
1) Storage QoS: Restrict disk throughput for less important virtual machines which consume a lot of disk I/O. Before this, the only solution was to upgrade storage to have faster and more disks. Quite an expensive way to solve an issue. With Windwos Server 2012 R2, configure Storage QoS on a per-virtual hard disk basis using the IOPs measurement:
- Maximum: hard cap on the number of IOPS a virtual hard disk can perform
- Minimum alert: alert if a virtual hard disk cannot perform at this minimum level.
Benefit: By far, the major offender in performance-related issues on server virtualization is the underlying storage subsystem. With Storage QoS, Windows Server 2012 addresses part of the issue with VMs by giving you control over any VM eating up a host’s bandwidth to the storage.
Example use cases:
- Limit the damage a VM can do in its affect on other VMs while troubleshooting what went wrong.
- Set limits where storage bandwidth is based on price bands – you pay more and you get faster storage.
2) Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX): Transfer data between storage systems without using the local computer’s CPU or network resources.
Benefit: This allows you to perform massive operations at a fraction of the speed by taking advantage of your SAN
3) Automatic TRIM and unmap: When files within a VM are deleted, Hyper-V and the VM notifies the files system of the additional space and the file system notifies the storage system about the deleted files which enables the storage system to reclaim the space.
Benefit: This feature makes capacity within your storage system more readily available by allowing the storage system to automatically reclaim/reuse storage deleted from a VM.
4) Automated Tiering in Storage Spaces: Pool a combination of SSDs and traditional spinning disks into a single virtual disk and data is automatically moved between tiers based on usage patterns.
Benefit: This feature speeds the performance in serving data that is frequently accessed while keeping costs down.
5) Data deduplication: Native deduplication can be applied on a per-volume basis without the use of third-party software. This is especially effective on Hyper-V hosts and VDI virtual hard disks. You can realize the following for typical space savings:
| Type | Content | Typical Space Savings |
| User documents | Documents, photos, music, videos |
30-50% |
| Deployment shares | Software binaries, cab files, symbols files |
70-80% |
| Virtualization libraries | Virtual hard disk files |
80-95% |
| General file share | All of the above |
50-60% |
Benefit: Especially in organization that use virtual hard disks in virtual desktop environments, you could save a lot of storage space. In these cases, the VHDs, all of which may contain an identical OS and applications, tend to be largely identical, so Windows Server can reduce all the identical bits into a single copy.
Interested in finding out more? See how Gridstore works to optimize Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V.
