VMM library servers in multiple sites -> synchronization of content
That’s a major issue that there is no support for DFS-R to keep different VMM library servers in different sites in sync or up to date. If we can use DFS-R for it that would be a good step forward.
Daniel Neumann
shared this idea
This feature is being planned, will update once we start working on this.
9 comments
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Kristopher Turner
commented
Why not take the same technology from ConfigMgr's Distribution Points and add them the VMM Library server?
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Michael Meacham
commented
My company currently manages six sites, 13 library servers, and over 7000 VMs with VMM; DFS-R with read-only copies for the remote library servers would be a perfect use case to support such an environment.
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Confused
commented
@Hector
Hi Hector, I am a little confused and hoping you can clarify. A Microsoft Hyper-V Senior Consultant engaged by a client has provided design guidance that it is ok/recommending to use DFS-R? You say it is not supported and he says it is - just not officially? Which one is it then? Ok or not ok? Supported or not supported?"You won’t find a Technet link stating that it’s supported. Nor will you find a link that states that it’s not supported either".
They also emailed an extract of the Microsoft services internal design guidance saying that it is recommended to leverage DFS-R for library replication and to select a library server as the master source for all objects and replicate from the master.
Any clarification appreciated.
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Kurt Roggen [BE]
commented
Hi Hector, I understand that the VMM team may have other and more important priorities and has limited dev cycles. However, it just seems strange that it takes that many generations for a datacenter product to provide such basic functionality and leverage DFS-R for synchronizing library servers in a controlled manner. VMM manages many great advanced scenarios, but tends to also miss out on basic scenarios.
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Matt Loretitsch
commented
Yes Hector...I apologize I didn't know that the issue was fixed in UR3. I use Robocopy or mail physical copies to sites with very slow links in liu of DFS-R.
I can use SAN replication (NetApp) at some sites, but not every site has one.
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Daniel Neumann
commented
b. VMM team can look into DFS-R support for a future release but no changes to the plan of record for R2 or vNext.
So I get you right that you aren't planning any solution to keep VMM library servers in multiple sites in sync for vNext?
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Hector Linares
commented
@Matt
Are you referring to replications storms between VMM Library servers with DFS-R and Remote Differential Compression (RDC) enabled?
UR3 fixed an issue in the Library refresher logic which re-wrote the same unique ID in the file's alternate data stream after every refresh.
Changes to the file's primary data stream, alternate data stream, or security stream will stage the file for replication and replicate the changes chunks. We got reports from customers where this was causing the CPU to spike to 100% on the Library server with many files. With the fix, the refresher does not modify the alt-stream.Please note:
a. The VMM engineering team agrees that the impact is serious enough to warrant a fix but that does not change our DFS-R support statement – VMM does not support DFS-R. The fix addresses VMMID overwriting which makes no sense with every library share refresh.
b. VMM team can look into DFS-R support for a future release but no changes to the plan of record for R2 or vNext. -
Matt Loretitsch
commented
Leveraging something like DFS would help considerably. You can't do that now since VMM marks files and causes DFS to re-replicate. Robocopying libraries around is tough since it copies such large amounts of data instead of blocks like DFS does.
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Anonymous
commented
Dealing with large cloud need multi site library management.
There is no native replication mecanism build into VMM to do this, but it's not the worst from my opinion.
Equivalent object management it totally horrific and you have no mean to automate because there is no Powershell command available !
This is something that can eliminate VMM as cloud management tool for large projects.