There are more and more Network Interface Cards (NICs) in our servers (Blades are different on this one). It is recommended to group (team) and dedicate NICs (with VLANs) to shape the traffic and gain performances.

But my setup didn’t allow the full deployment of this recommendation as:

• Some servers don’t have enough NICs
• The network uses mixed technologies (Ethernet and Infiniband)

 What happened is I realized I was not getting the full throughput from my Storage components, and used SMB multichannel to solve it.

The setup

 The setup is super classic:

• 1 ethernet network for administration
• 3 Infiniband HBA and Subnets (created by OpenSM) for the clustered storage
• The Storage is exposed to the cluster through a SMB Share (new feature from SMB 3, Hyper-V 2012 and Failover clustering for Hyper-V 2012 R2)

The issue:

When the Administration NIC is enabled, the data copy between the Storage server and a cluster node, is capped by the Ethernet card through put (1 Gbps):

But it should go through the InfiniBand HBA as I created NIC metrics, modified hosts records etc. for the communication between the 3 servers to go through the InfiniBand cards that have a 10 Gbps throughput.

 To test it is technically possible, I disabled the administration NIC and retested with the following results:

So, this is obvious, the data flow goes through the Admin card, even if host file and NIC metric are set to force the use of the dedicated subnet to connect to the storage server. As the copy goes through Windows File Shares (SMB protocol, using the \\Server\FileShare convention), I needed a way to force the flow through a specific IP / subnet.

The solution: SMB Multichannel

The SMB Multichannel solves the issue. It can force the network flow for the storage server to go through the high-speed NIC, and not the administration network. In this configuration, the storage server is the “SMB Server” and the 2 cluster nodes are the “SMB Clients”, which can be done following this configuration:

• Check SMB multichannel status:

On the Storage server (the SMB server), type:

Get-SmbServerConfiguration | Select EnableMultiChannel

If True is returned, you`re good. If not, type:

Set-SmbServerConfiguration -EnableMultiChannel $true

 On the Cluster nodes (the SMB client), type:

Get-SmbClientConfiguration | Select EnableMultiChannel

If True is returned, you`re good. If not, type:

Set-SmbClientConfiguration -EnableMultiChannel $true

• Check SMB connection status on the connections:

On the Cluster nodes (the SMB client), type:

Get-SmbConnection

It returns the share that the node is connected to. Here, you want to check the version used (the Dialect). For Windows Server 2012 R2, you should have 3.02

Then, check how the connection is done (through which adapters does it go), typing:

Get-SmbMultichannelConnection

You can see the “Client IP” and the “Server IP”. It should allow you to check that SMB uses the appropriate network.

•  Constraint SMB Multichannel

To fix the issue, I force the connection to happen through the adapter I want. In that case I list the adapters with this command:

Get-NetAdapter | select -Property Name, LinkSpeed

I choose the adapter name I want to force and the “SMB Server” name to forcely connect to:

New-SmbMultichannelConstraint -InterfaceAlias "AdapterToStorage" -ServerName "Storage"

Answer “Yes to All” to the confirmation prompt, then check the result typing:

Get-SmbMultichannelConnection

•  Do that for all the Cluster nodes

 The results are now the ones expected (with Admin card enabled):

The storage flow goes through the constrained adapter (the 10Gbps one), even if the Administrative network is connected on all the servers (Storage + Cluster nodes)

2 sides notes here:

1. The increase from 2 Gbps to 5.5 Gbps transfer in the print screens is due to different files transferred and RAM caching effect for the testing
2. The same principle is applied to the LiveMigration subnet to force transfers through SMB between the nodes to use the fastest network (Option in Hyper-V settings)

 Hope this helps

<Emmanuel />

References:

• Deploy SMB multichannel: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn610980.aspx

With the wide use of virtualization platforms to run Microsoft Servers’ workloads, for the last few years, we faced a lot of questions regarding templates for SharePoint (Virtual Machines and Services Templates – in SC VMM, Base/Managed Templates, Cloning, etc.). The aim is super simple: Create once a Virtual Machine that can become a VM template. Then use it as the base to create multiple Virtual Machines.

The best (and supported way) to do this with Windows technologies is to use the SYSPREP tool. This tool stands for System Preparation tool (more info here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721940(v=ws.10).aspx ). When launched it does few actions that will prepare the server for duplication like:

• Removes system-specific data from Windows like the server name, the network settings (IP and MAC addresses)
• Rearming the license and activation data
• Remove the SID and domain related data
• Etc. (this list is not exhaustive)

For SharePoint (2010 & 2013, all editions), there are components that will “survive” a “sysprep” and others that won’t:

• The SharePoint components that will survive a Sysprep are:
• The Prerequisites
• The SharePoint binaries (setup.exe)
• The Language Packs (setup.exe)
• Service Packs (setup.exe or msi or Slipstream setup)
• Cumulative Updates
• The SharePoint components THAT WON’T SURVIVE a SYSPREP and give an unsupported server are:
• Every tasks related to the configuration wizard, Central Administration and farm settings
• Said differently, one SharePoint server joined/member of a SharePoint farm cannot be used to create a VM template

From this, how to create a supported SharePoint VM template?

1. Setup a VM with Windows Server and all the settings/policies in place in your environment (disks, NICs, event logging, agents, antivirus, etc.). Careful here, you can only sysprep 2 times a Windows server. If you use a Windows Server template as a starting point, then you can only use once more sysprep on this Server (for SharePoint in our case)
2. Install the SharePoint Prerequisites (with either the installer or the command line)
3. Install SharePoint (i.e. run the Setup.exe, enter the License key, choose Server Farm option – DO NOT choose standalone)
4. Install the Language Packs you need (if any)
5. Install the latest Service Packs and Cumulative Updates you want (ideally slipstream the install media and the unattended answer file)
6. Once all is done, and no SharePoint Configuration wizard or “psconfig” did run, create the VM template from this VM:
   1. Either launch the UI with "Sysprep" / Enter the command "%WINDIR%\system32\sysprep /oobe /shutdown /generalize"
   2. Or use your virtualization management server to create the template – like in SC VMM
7. Then either use directly a copy of the resulting Virtual Disk or the VM template stored in the virtualization management library, to create multiple/new SharePoint VMs servers
8. Once these servers are created, you can create or join them to a SharePoint farm

Hope this will help a lot of you.

<Emmanuel/>

 P.S.: The maintenance of the template is whole topic in itself, I won't cover here.

References:

• Using Sysprep to create SharePoint 2010 images for use in Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2728976
• Install SharePoint 2013 across multiple servers for a three-tier farm: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee805948(v=office.15).aspx#PrepareServers

One of the bad surprises we all experienced with new releases is the “driver story”. In my servers, I run Infiniband HCA from Mellanox (for 10Gbps network / SAN).

As usual, the HCA is shown like this after a fresh install:

The set of drivers I use comes from the Open Fabrics Alliance, and they installed very well on Win 2008 R2 and Win 2012 (after a little trick to unlock the OS version check in the installer).
But, with 2012 R2, I had this:

- Everything goes fine:

- Then

And that’s it.

The explanation I finally found is: the signed drivers enforcement is stricter in Windows Server 2012 R2, than previous OS. So, for whatever reason, a driver working in 2012 may not be accepted on 2012 R2, even if the kernel core is the same (more info on Signed drivers here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff544865%28v=vs.85%29.aspx) .

My solution: remove the stronger signature enforcement, by changing the OS boot options. The official solution being to contact your vendor for a signed driver (that may not be available for your hardware anymore ….)

To implement my solution, I had to:
1. Display the Windows Charms (Windows + C)

2. Click on  “Settings”
3. Click “Power”
4. then Click “Restart” WHILE PRESSING THE LEFT SHIFT KEY!!!

 5. With this action, the following menu appears before the shutdown:

6. Click on “Troubleshoot”
7. Then “Startup settings”:

8. Then, click “Restart”

9. The server finally reboots
10. And present the “Advanced Boot Options” (do you remember “F8”?)

 
11.    You can now select the Option “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement”
 

12.    Press “Enter”
13.    The server boots normally
14.    Install the exact same driver package:
14a.    Click “Install this driver software anyway” (you don’t want to pay for new hardware and drivers):

14b.    Do it as many times as required (in my case 5 times)
14c.    Then the drivers setup ends:

15.    And the HCA card is here:

 
And enjoy your hardware until the next major release of Windows Server.
<Emmanuel/>

P.S.: If you want to be sure it is a driver signature issue, try to update the driver and check the message:

One of my NAS provider recent updates enabled some advanced features for the LUNs I wanted to test, before upgrading my entire Private Cloud fabric to Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2.

I am talking about the ODX feature my NAS LUNs are now capable of. As storage is the current heart and the main bottleneck in our clouds, the ODX promise to store and get fast Virtual Machines operations is extremely appealing.

ODX setup

To test and get an idea of what it was capable of, I created a dedicated LUN on my NAS with the Advanced LUN features activated (including the Windows ODX):

The LUN is mapped to an iSCSI target on the NAS.

Then, the LUN is connected to a Windows Server 2012 R2 host, which runs Hyper-V, through Windows iSCSI initiator.

The LUN is exposed to Windows as a Disk, on which a partition and a volume are created, formatted in NTFS.

Once this is done, the documentation is unclear on how to Enable ODX. So I used the various resources found on the Internet and did this:

To enable ODX, in a Windows PowerShell cmd line, running as Administrator, type:

Set-ItemProperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem -Name "FilterSupportedFeaturesMode" -Value 0

To disable ODX, type the following:

Set-ItemProperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem -Name "FilterSupportedFeaturesMode" -Value 1

Tests

Block Zeroing

To test the Block Zeroing feature of ODX (the capability to create files filled in with 0), I create a fixed size VHDX file of 50GB.

In PowerShell, disable ODX and create a new VHDX file

Code:

Set-ItemProperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem -Name "FilterSupportedFeaturesMode" -Value 1

Measure-Command { New-VHD -Path E:\TestVHD-50GB.vhdx -Size 50GB -Fixed}

File creation duration: 19 minutes and 48 seconds

Then, in PowerShell, enable ODX and create another VHDX file

Code

Set-ItemProperty HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem -Name "FilterSupportedFeaturesMode" -Value 0

Measure-Command { New-VHD -Path E:\TestVHD-50GB-ODX.vhdx -Size 50GB -Fixed}

File creation duration: 7 seconds!!!! - for a 50 GB file

Full Copy

To test the copy, I copied the created files without then with ODX, with this PowerShell command:

Measure-Command { Copy-Item E:\TestVHD-50GB.vhdx E:\CopiedTestVHD.vhdx }

Copy without ODX:

Copy duration without ODX: 26 minutes and 21 seconds

Copy WITH ODX:

Copy duration WITH ODX: 24 seconds!!!!

Conclusion

If any of your fabric components are ODX capable, you want to Enable it and leverage the blasting files operations speed.

The gains I measured tell it all:

References

My SAN hardware provider feature

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/business_virtualization_iscsi_virtualization_support

Deploy Windows Offloaded Data Transfers

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200627.aspx

NTFS Cluster size for Hyper-V

https://outlookcloudy.blogspot.ca/2011/12/ntfs-cluster-size-for-storing-vms.html

Notes From The Field Using ODX With HP 3PAR Storage Arrays

https://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/hvredevoort/2013/07/notes-from-the-field-using-odx-with-hp-3par-storage-arrays/

During this spring I had the opportunity to talk and dig on what can be done with System Center 2012 (RTM, SP1 and soon R2) to offer SharePoint based services to users and organizations.

As I spent time linking complex workloads with System Center, I used experience and discussions to create a synthetic deck I could present at these 2 events:

• SharePoint Summit in Quebec City, QC

• SharePoint Saturday in Boston, MA

The (English) deck is attached to this post. It should help SharePoint administrators to approach what is a SharePoint service and how System Center helps.

While building and presenting this talk, I realized an obvious classification: System Center integrates with SharePoint in 2 ways:

• The integrated and supported way, through Management packs, connectors and built-in capabilities (like DPM for SharePoint)
• The lightweight way, providing tools so that we can be more productive, efficient and creative. This enables value and productivity through processes. They have to be proven, reliable and efficient AND Microsoft will never support them. We just support the tools (like for Visual Studio, the compiler is supported, not the resulting App).

The deck describes what a SharePoint service means, what System Center brings in and give insights on the 2 ways to integrate.

Don’t hesitate to share thoughts and remarks.

Thanks

Emmanuel.

2013-04-27_Sp2013_SystemCenter2012Sp1.pdf

Few months ago, I started a project I wanted to build for years: getting my hands dirty designing and building the necessary equipment to push IT automation and Industrial Engineering cross feedings.

So I started to build a rack of servers in the basement.

My constraints were:

• Cheap
• Relevant to test all System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager features
• Reliable
• Get sufficient performances to diminish deployment wasting time (preventing 1h duration to copy a 20GB (VHD) file)
• Designed by me from the ground up
• As it is in the basement, it must survive a reasonable flood

And here’s the result:

It features:

• 7 physical servers,
• The equivalent of 115 GHz of CPU power,
• 112GB of RAM,
• 44 TB of mixed SSDs and HDDs storage, in both DAS and SAN configurations,
• 1GBps Ethernet & 10GBps InfiniBand networks,
• Redundant Internet connections,
• It mainly runs Windows Server 2012,
• but also runs 1 VMware ESXi and 1 XenServer hosts,

 Building this rack, I learned:

• There is A LOT of space for improvements in servers' rack industry for an industrial engineer eye:
• There's only 2 standards in place:
• The rack width (mainly 19' but also 23' from Telco world)
• The unitary height (the U)
• Out of these, you’re on your own (or in your hardware provider hands if you prefer),
• The length of servers isn’t standard: when adding a 3U box, I had to extend the rack length!
• Cabling is a nightmare, you either go “quick and dirty”, but then can’t maintain it, or make manual/specific cabling, and spend days building and connecting the components. In both cases, you’re in a relatively fixed configuration: any change will be painful!
• There’s still a lot of lost volume in this. Even if air cooling may justify it, this can be much more optimized: just take all your components individually, see the volume, then rack them and compare the volume used…
• You can save a lot of money choosing the components: I discovered a server I built myself, buying a server rack chassis, was 4 to 6 times cheaper than the same box ordered from a major manufacturer web site (?)
• All this is not flexible: you can’t add or remove capacity easily (because of weight, space, cabling, power, cooling and network impacts)
• The UPS (batteries) are the heaviest components set in the rack, then the Hard Disks Drives
• And, of course, all this heats the basement like hell….

 What I suggest to improve this story:

• If you can, go to the cloud to run all these services: DO IT! Bandwidth allow now to consume most of IT services in a secured/encrypted manner. You may get higher Opex and strong dependency to your provider, but, compared to the Capex of owning these servers + running them … You gain on costs and agility. And NO Business customer will beat the Datacenter design and optimization the few majors players in this space does (Google, Amazon and us),
• Servers’ designers should seriously consider reducing their price: The only way industries did that for centuries is standardization. My vision in this space is:

• Use a standardized connector for network, power (and cooling?) – that’s what Google does in its datacenters
• Put everything in front of the chassis: why the hell do I have to go behind the rack? (https://www.google.ca/about/datacenters/gallery/#/tech/20)
• Of course, server lames are the latest direction, but the chassis is super expensive, and there are no standards between the vendors. You choose one, you’re done. How ready can you be to buy a (expensive) lame chassis, which is mainly a set of proprietary slots and connectors?
• Agree on a standard length for the chassis!
• The UPS should be within the chassis, part of each individual component
• Why not including water cooling within the components. That’s much more efficient and allows a better space concentration. Even Porsche switched to water cooling!
• The trend is to add and remove capacity on the go. It needs the appropriate software to do so (specific OS and FS). That’s why the players run specific OS on their datacenters. But once available, you add or remove resources to your datacenter adding ready-to-use resources boxes. With appropriate technology and standardization, they may not be bigger than “power users” laptops, in size

 Now that my basement is heated, I can start to focus on workloads’ industrialization.

<Emmanuel/> 

References:

• 19-inch rack (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19-inch_rack
• ITPACS: Microsoft servers’ building block for World scale datacenters: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/goto100/archive/2010/03/30/microsoft-generation-4-datacenter-using-itpacs.aspx
• Industrial engineering (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering
• The industry news site: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/

While I focus on bringing SharePoint on top of cloud technologies customers can use, the SharePoint engineering and product teams released SharePoint 2013 Preview, more than 1 month ago.

Preview is a marketing name for one of the Beta release we always did for our products.

The thing I am really amazed with, is that they also made available a full TechNet Resource center for IT Pros!

You definitely want to have a look at it: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/fp142366

This is GREAT, Kudos to the SharePoint Product and UA teams, this is really great (I won't name them, I'll miss some ;-) )

-Emmanuel

My basement allows me to run a mini digital plant at home. (Smile).

Even if electrical power is pretty cheap in Quebec province (thanks to hydraulic electrical plants), you may want to have a look at the power plan your servers currently run: it may either over consuming power for nothing, or have not enough power to deliver…

That’s extreme ends, but you may want to have a look. To do that run: 

gwmi win32_powerplan -namespace root\cimv2\power | ft -Property ElementName, IsActive -Autosize

You will see the default power plan for a Windows Server 2008 R2 is: "Balanced"

What does it mean?

It means you don't get by default all the Computing power you can expect from your Windows Server ….

That may be a problem if you hit performances degradations, or expect more from your computing pools. The most tangible impact would be on both Hyper-V servers and SQL Servers you have (for your SharePoint farms in our case).

On the other hand, you can change it dynamically with a (Remote?) PowerShell command.

You can even orchestrate this setting with System Center 2012 (I'll cover that in future posts), monitoring the CPU and disk demand (with SC OM), to trigger a power plan change (with Orchestrator)

To change the Power Plan to High Performance (or any other one available), you may use these 2 commands:

$HighPerfPowerPlan = gwmi win32_powerplan -namespace root\cimv2\power -computername localhost -filter "elementname='High performance'" ;

$HighPerfPowerPlan.Activate()

And here you go …. The gain can be between 10 and 25% in performances (for High Performance, especially if this machine is a SQL Server physical box).

Note the -ComputerName parameter, and have a look at Get-WmiObject cmdlet…. You'll see you can easily apply this to a bunch of servers with one command line (or ps1 script).

Or through GPOs: I just realized Microsoft uses this internally to enforce a Power Plan on corporate Laptops and workstations. Funny isn’t it?

-Emmanuel

 Inspired from these 2 sources:

• https://blogs.technet.com/b/lukeb/archive/2011/04/13/sharepoint-servers-and-powerplans.aspx
• https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2207548
•  ...and local sweat :-)

When you work on various platforms, and change frequently your infrastructure settings, you may want to see how the servers react to these giving the platform some time to live with it.

But you may also want to monitor and check that, after a settings change, the system runs as you wanted, or some errors you wanted to correct do not reappear (that you fixed the problem – not closed the incident).

Windows Server 2008 R2 event log viewer give a lot of of features – so much more than with 2003 – but that it is almost counterproductive for this matter:

How can someone work on 17,269 Audit failures, happened on the last 7 days, like here?

Simple, you can’t.

So what?

• Search, filter, and create custom views to identify your big guys.
• Correct the problem
• Then clear the event log and come back later.

But clearing the event log is a real challenge with Windows Server 2008 R2. Everything is done so that you can’t clear it (that’s to help support and ops to find problems).

One pretty convenient and efficient way to clear the logs, to check the positive effect of problem solving actions is to use PowerShell:

Run (as Administrator):                 wevtutil el | foreach { wevtutil cl $_ }

Let it run (can take few minutes to complete)

Refresh the Event Viewer:

And hop: a clear and fresh Event Log is here:

Pretty useful to tune environments.

As you may have read in some of my previous posts, I spent the first 7 months of 2010 contributing to the SharePoint Online standard 2010 infrastructure. This infrastructure will provide SharePoint 2010 based services to tens of millions of people worldwide. In fact, it makes SharePoint fly in the Cloud, using Microsoft “boxed” / available products.

There are few keys to have in mind when thinking about this:

• SharePoint Online IS the SharePoint cloud (service)
• The underlying infrastructure of SharePoint Online needs to enable all the cloud computing attributes (more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Key_features)
• The only way to implement these key features is to HEAVILY automate SharePoint and its underlying technologies (Windows Server, AD DS, Hyper-V, SQL Server) for the obvious ones.
• The key enabler of all this is definitely Windows PowerShell v2 (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee829690.aspx), but that's just a tool.

If you follow my blog, you will know that SharePoint Automation is a whole topic in itself, and one that I am passionate about.

SharePoint & Cloud computing

I have developed the following broad thinking for automation and optimization of the services:

• A well-structured model is essential here. It should be based on the core concepts as implemented through the processes and can be used to develop the arguments for each task.
• In a cloud(y) environment, failure to get requested operations implemented is often the rule => Expect failure, and plan on this base.
• Here are few key concepts, features and characteristics of a large automated SharePoint system:
  • Reliability and resiliency - the service itself must be able to withstand whatever may happen in the layers below it.
  • Idempotency - the characteristics of operational tasks that can be replayed very often, without creating any discrepancy between the desired and actual states of the system.
  • Scale units - plan resources with coherent set of resources, called scale units.
  • Virtualization - from Hyper-V to “hypervisor on chip”; but that also could work with VMWare, Xen or VBox, if the necessary tasks are exposed with APIs.
  • Utility computing - use when needed, compute, then drop  or re-assign.
  • Autonomic systems - that manage themselves to serve their purpose.
  • Always optimize the resources, and on a continual basis
  • Elasticity - ability to absorb unexpected demand fluctuations
  • Agility - rapid provisioning of additional resources or services
  • System metering (monitoring and telemetry) - critical to know what happens.
  • Trust is necessary between components (sharing the data and security context) in distributed systems.
  • Continuous deployment - cut each service into smaller parts linked by interface contracts, so that each part can be continuously improved.

I spent a lot of time studying these concepts with 2 aspects in mind:

• Theoretically : Thanks to various internal works and lectures, partners and competitors White Papers, books & keynotes
• Practically : Learning how MSFT use them in its Datacenters for its Cloud services (ranging from Live Messenger/Hotmail, Bing, Office365 and Azure platform).

It led me realizing that: Cloud computing is the "Industrial age" of Datacenters!

Industrial Engineering in Cloud computing

My academic background is in Industrial Engineering, with a (French equivalent) Master of Science diploma in Industrial Engineering and certain advanced specializations.

Cloud computing terminology is very close to that of Industrial Engineering (sometimes closer to than to Computer science). Check for yourself terms you’ll find in the references and books at the end of this post, such as:

• Resource management
• Resiliency
• Elasticity
• Common environmental requirements
• Power
• Efficiency
• Productivity
• Cost optimization
• Lifecycles
• Workloads

ALL these words are from mechanics, physics or industrial engineering that have been developed for more than a century, when “factories” were invented.
When you see a “modern – Internet scale” Datacenter … what do you see? You see a huge building, looking like a car supplier factory more than a “data processing” facility, don’t you? So I started to analyze the core similarity between the “factories” that I used to work with while in automotive industry, and the Cloud computing concepts. This is how I came to the “Digital Plant” concept.

From Datacenters to Digital Plants ...

While I studied which Industrial approaches and tools could be transferred to design Digital Plants, I found common points between Computer and Industrial science:

• Lifetime and workload management are the same issues and drivers
• Discrete manufacturing (like cars) can bring a lot on the planning and resources/assets optimization
• Process manufacturing (like glass or chemistry) can bring a lot on the "recipes" optimization to deliver a product (a service in the case of the Digital plant)
• Utilities industries - of course - (like electricity or water) can bring a lot on the way they plan and optimize their resources generation, distribution and final consumption, as almost no stock is possible. And you cannot "store" either an online service.

Based on these roots, I searched for technics and mathematical tooling used in Industry that could be applied to Cloud computing. I found some of them very useful and interesting when transferred into a Digital plant. They include:

• Multiple Products (and Services) Lifecycle Management in parallel:
  • Digital plant building and foundation has a "long" lifetime (around 10 years)
  • Digital plant productive components (such as servers, network hardware, etc.) has a "middle" lifetime (around 3 years)
  • Digital plant sold service (the Online service which is sold) has a "short" lifetime, as its software based, and evolving in a very competitive environment (can be few weeks)
  • More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_lifecycle_management
• The Pareto distribution applies:
  • This rule commonly named '80-20' is key for planning and optimization
  • More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
• Resources optimization:
  • Workload demand fluctuates constantly
  • So the resources are always a little bit either too much or not enough available
  • It leads to take an analytical approach, in fact, a holistic approach for planning and optimization:
    • it's impossible to calculate according all the inputs to obtain the expected outputs with the assets used.
    • It means constant tradeoff in design and operations of the resources.

=> Resource optimization is the essence of Industrial Engineering.

• The only way to get some manageable system is to switch to statistical and probabilistic approaches, driven by mathematical models

• It means Digital plants mix and optimize a lot of different distributions, like:

  • The normal (Gaussian) one
  • Log / exponential ones
  • Poisson rule and its derivated
  • Plus there associated transfer functions to extract from data/measures the trends to prepare decisions
  • More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_(mathematics)

 Here are few examples of what should be considered relevant models:

• Look at the CPU usage for a given period of time of a virtual machine:

 If you transform this measure into time spent in "ranges" (like 0 to 10%, 10 to 19%, etc.), you'll obtain a CPU resource distribution close to this model

• Another pattern you may often find is the "parts distribution" like these 2 ones, which are extracted from storage data analysis on a disk (or LUN): it represents the total size stored on this LUN per file extension:

Now let's zoom on the first 10%, and the trend is clearer: This is an exponential distribution 

And the funny part. This same LUN, now seen through the items counts per file extension: same pattern!

• For the demand fluctuations/constant changes, the stock analysis models may be very useful. One to consider would be the Elliott wave: 

• These models are the key for the resource optimizer to implement and continuously tune in a Digital plant. It adds the idea that the past helps to prepare the future.
• An important key is to find the correlations between the relevant inputs and the efficient result/product/service to provide. Here again, Industrial engineering methodology, especially the Taguchi related ones should be of great help.
• My last point here would be about the sampling rates. All this is based on large data collection. But this data collection, should not impact the service. It has to be tuned to get accurate correlations but without adding disturbance to the system itself. Another tradeoff endless scenario experienced in Industrial Engineering.

As I moved on to sort out all these ideas, I realized various things:

• There's not that much research in this area - current approaches are still analytical and driven to achieve an exact situation (which is not particularly useful)
• Many ideas are emerging from this. There's probably space to study, and write a book on them
• All this is possible thanks to the huge improvements in network bandwidth and availability over the years. When you think back to BNC Ethernet networks 20 years ago, they were so much slower than my current personal ADSL connection to the Internet ....

To end this call for a story to write, I'd like to emphasis 2 things:

1. Have a look at what an Industrial Plant is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_plant ) then watch and browse the references below on current Datacenters. You'll be hit by the similarities.
2. I want to contribute to this cross discipline effort, where the best of 2 worlds (Computer & Industrial sciences) come together to create a new environment for innovation.

Contact me if you're interested too  :-)

 Thanks reading this long post, which is broader than just SharePoint automation.

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References:

The evolution of Cloud Computing and the changing anatomy of a Microsoft data center: https://sharepointineducation.com/the-evolution-of-cloud-computing-and-the-changing-anatomy-of-a-microsoft-data-centre

Data Center knowledge: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/

Microsoft Datacenters Blog: https://blogs.technet.com/b/msdatacenters/

Automation definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation

Automation Outline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_automation

Principles & Theory of Automation: https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/44912/automation/24841/Principles-and-theory-of-automation

The Cloud: Battle of the Tech Titans: https://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_11/b4219052599182.htm

Books:

The Datacenter as a Computer, Luiz Barroso, Urs Hölzle (Google Inc.), Morgan & Claypool, https://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y200905CAC006

Monitoring the Data Center, Virtual Environments, and the Cloud, Don Jones, https://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/dgmdv.php

The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr, W. W. Norton & Company, https://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/