As
many of you are aware, one of the most important
scenarios enabled by modern versions of Windows is the creation of a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) through new technologies like Storage Spaces
Direct (S2D). Right now, all the technology
you need to create this infrastructure is simply baked into Windows
Server Data centre, waiting for someone to enable
and configure
it for their use. However, in
order to receive support in a production environment, there
are a number of quality hurdles that have to
be cleared, particularly around the
hardware used to create them. The work that
goes into designing and
testing these solutions is intense. As with any
other Windows feature, you can do much
of this work yourself. However,
most IT organizations don’t
have the resources to perform the same level
of integration testing
as our partner ecosystem.
To ease your path to
a high
quality experience, we created the WSSD program. WSSD
enables our partners to easily list and sell fully tested and supported configurations. We recommend
our customers use these pre-certified solutions instead
of trying to build their own. Rather than just
asking you to take our word for it, I’m going to attempt
to provide an understanding of the kind of technical
work these vendors do as integrators, and why building
off the shelf is a bad idea for critical production workloads.
Device and system certification
The first step
in this process is certifying that critical devices in the system can perform the work that’s needed. To that end, we use our existing Windows Server Catalogue and logo program to
test and enforce some baseline functionality. All devices must have the Windows Server 2016 logo
as a baseline requirement. Additionally,
in order to be supported with S2D and HCI, some
devices need one of the Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC) additional
qualifiers (AQ). These
AQ’s represent the fact that a device has undergone
additional testing specifically meant to ensure they’ll work as expected in an
HCI environment. Currently, there are 4 classes of devices that need this
additional testing:
·
Systems (Servers)
·
NICs
·
Storage Adapters (SAS/SATA HBAs)
·
Mass Storage Devices (NVMe/SSD/HDD)
While you could assemble a group
of different certified devices and build a
supported configuration, you’d be missing
one critically important step: Integrated
testing. All
of those parts underwent some level of additional
testing, but
not together as a group. Your disk
from Company A was probably tested in a system
from OEM B using an HBA from HBA Vendor C.
None of that tells you that same disk will perform in YOUR
system from OEM Y that uses an HBA from HBA Vendor Z. It
might work fine 99% of the time, but then run into an unexpected interop
issue during your heaviest (and usually most
important) usage times, and now your
business is being impacted.
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