Roger's BI Blog

Microsoft must have been thinking that the live of a Windows administrator gets so boring that they need a distraction and they have integrated the XBox Live extensions standard in Windows Server 2016.  No kidding: take a look. I did not select it as a feature and it is there. As you can see the XBox Live service is started automatically even in mode manual (see error log).  To my opinion these 3 XBox Live services should never be available on a server. Unless the server is part of the XBox Live platform of cause but honestly I don't think that Microsoft will allow that.  Every IT manager with a serious Windows production environment would fire any administrator playing XBox Live on the production servers. So though it might be tempting don't do it Windows administrator. It is a trap! :-)

Storage Spaces is a component available in Windows 2012. Microsoft has used this technique in their Microsoft Analytics Platform System or previously named SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse.  But as I will show they got stuck in the 'old way of thinking' which will only work (slightly?) better if we live in a perfect world, were all data is requested at the same time. In a lot of cases this is not so.... The hardware behind Microsoft Analytics Platform System When looking closer at the hardware the Hewlett and Packard (HP) solution based on the DL360 Gen8, which has 2 PCIe slots, is equipped with one H221 SAS controller with two 4x6 Gb/s ports and one Melanox Infini Band 56 Gb/s controller. In the HP solution the JBOD is divided in two: every node manages 32 disks.  Dell addresses the solution with the PowerEdge R620 which has maximum 3 PCIe slots but 2 JBODs so in order to address all 102 disks in the JBOD's they need to do the same as HP namely one SAS 

This post is based on the tests I did to see if storage spaces in Windows 2012R2 can serve as a platform for our Fast Track environments. When Microsoft developed the Fast Track Data Warehouse architecture, which was at first very limited in hardware choice and for version SQL Server 2012 became a reference guide, Storage Spaces as a functionality in Windows did not exist.That has changed with the release of Windows 2012 and later on with version 2012R2 and soon 2016. Why is Storage Spaces as a storage technology so interesting for SQL Server?  Anyone who is a pro in SQL Server knows that parallelism - adding more disks - can greatly improve performance. Adding an hard disk for the tempdb and another one for the LOG files will do the job if the hard disks perform sufficiently (that might be another issue!). To my opinion (and also to others) SQL Server does not do a great job in using the available hardware. Before and after the installation it is mandatory to tune a SQL Server