Windows 8 Storage and Hyper-V – Part 1: Introduction

If you are a server, storage or network vendor, please also read the last section.

Now that the Windows Server 8 beta can be expected any time now – but promised before the last week of February 2012 – it might be a good idea to start looking at several of the groundbreaking storage related technologies that could turn up in Windows 8. I stress the word could because we must always be careful since functionality shown in Pre-RTM builds is never guaranteed to be in the GA release.

I am planning to write a couple of blogs about Windows 8 Storage which in many cases is related to the new version of Hyper-V.

If you are running a SAN but also if your company simply can’t afford a SAN, chances are that you will see significant performance increases when reading, writing, copying, moving data with Windows Server 8. In-box storage manageability with PowerShell will strongly contribute to making Windows 8 Storage one of the major pillars of the Microsoft Private Cloud Fabric. As I have looked at it so far, storage is handled extremely well in Windows Server 8. Mind you this is only what I have determined based on what I have heard and seen on \\build and have personally tested since September 2011 with the Windows 8 Developer Preview.

This edition is not at all intended to be stable and testing with de Developer Preview is a true challenge. As a preparation for the Hyper-V.nu event with several sessions on Windows Server 8, I wanted to try out and show some unique new functionality for moving living Hyper-V guests between different types of storage. I had time for building up the pre-requisites and was able to successfully show a Live Storage Migration of a guest between two SMB2 shares on a ScaleOut File Cluster. But there were several other Live Storage moves that I tested but also want to explore further:

• Live Storage Migrate a guest from USB disk to a local disk
• Live Storage Migrate a guest from a local disk to a new Windows 8 Pool and Spaces virtual disk
• Live Storage Migrate a guest from local disk to shared storage on a single host
• Live Storage Migrate a guest from a shared disk on a single host to a shared disk on a Windows 8 Hyper-V cluster
• Live Storage Migrate a guest from a shared disk on a cluster to a CSV version 2 volume on the same cluster
• Live Storage Migrate a guest from any location to an SMB2 file share on a ScaleOut Fileserver with Continuously Available Shares
• Live Storage Migrate a guest between two SMB2 file shares on the same Windows 8 Hyper-V cluster while the ScaleOut Fileserver cluster is moved between nodes.
• Live Storage Migrate a guest between an SMB2 file share used by one Windows 8 Hyper-V cluster to another Hyper-V cluster or even to another SMB2 file share on another server.

Am I now running out of options?  On the contrary, I have only just started!

While thinking about all these possibilities there are quite a few concepts that need work and further thought. I’d say a perfect topic for a series of blogs on Windows 8 Storage and Hyper-V. If Hyper-V is not directly involved, those topics will be treated as well.

Some of the topics that I can now think of are:

• VHDX and Storage PowerShell
• Windows 8 File Server with Pools and Spaces
• Windows 8 iSCSI Target Server
• Windows 8 ScaleOut File Server
• Cluster Shared Volumes 2.0
• Live Storage Migration
• Offload Data Transfer (ODX)
• Hyper-V Virtual Fibre Channel
• Hyper-V Replica
• Live VHD Merge
• Storage Metering
• Native 4K disk Support
• Backup & Recovery with Windows 8 Storage

Last week I presented Windows 8 Hyper-V and storage and was able to show a few stunning things related to this subject. The slides and videos will be available from this blog shortly.