Ben Thul's questions

I'm currently exploring using Storage Spaces to create a mirrored volume. In benchmarking it against a mirrored volume created with diskpart, I notice that I'm getting twice the throughput on reads. I'm speculating that the diskpart volume is able to make requests of both drives in the mirror in parallel. Is there a way to get that behavior out of the Storage Spaces mirrored volume?

We are running SQL Server on ec2 and have assembled a Storage Space from multiple EBS volumes to hold the databases. This has been working better than we'd anticipated. But I'd like to explore snapshot-based backups and this leads to my question.

Is is possible to assemble a Storage Pool from its constituent disks and have the data remain in tact? For my particulars, I want to be able to do something like the following:

1. Quiesce database writes (I think I've got a good tool for this).
2. Snapshot the individual ebs volumes that make up the Storage Pool that holds the data.
3. Present those snapshots to a different server.
4. Assemble a storage pool out of those disks, preserving the virtual disk and its data.
5. Attach the databases.

I don't even know where to begin searching for this.

I'm attempting to use aws s3 sync to push a bunch of backup files from my Windows server to an s3 bucket. The problem that I'm running into is that it appears to be picking up the Recycle Bin and System Volume Information. Unfortunately, it's unable to traverse into those directories and so ultimately the command exits with a non-zero status.

Here's what I'm trying as my command line:

aws s3 sync X:\Backup\ s3://«my bucket name» --exclude '*\$RECYCLE.BIN\*' --exclude "System Volume Information\*"  --exclude '*.trn' --include '*.bak'

I've tried several variations of the --exclude parameter but to no avail.

I'm exploring Storage Pools in Windows Server 2016 and I'm trying to create one virtual disk that uses the entirety of the space available in the pool. However, it appears that it's not using all available space.

In my instance, I have 4x50Gb drives in the pool. However, when I issue a New-VirtualDisk -UseMaximumSize, the size of the drive is only 192 Gb. Why is it not able to use the remaining 8Gb?

Is there a way for me to see what the maximum available space in the pool is at any time? Applicable to the above but also, say for instance, I add more disks into the pool and would like to expand the virtual drive. How would I know the value to pass to Resize-VirtualDisk (annoyingly, there's no -UseMaximumSize parameter on that cmdlet)?

I'm attempting to set up anti-affinity rules in a two-node Windows 2012 cluster. I'm doing something like:

$value = New-Object System.Collections.Specialized.StringCollection;
$value.Add('ArbitraryString');
(get-clustergroup group1).AntiAffinityClassNames = $value;
(get-clustergroup group2).AntiAffinityClassNames = $value;

Before I initiate a failover, group1 and group2 are on different nodes. However, after I initiate a failover of group1, group2 doesn't move away from group1. What am I missing?

It should be noted that one of these groups is a SQL Availability Group (the other is not; I just don't want it to be hosted on the same node as the primary for the AG). So, failover of that group isn't initiated through cluster administrator, but rather through SQL Server. I don't think it's relevant, but just in case it is…

I'm trying to correlate volumes (as enumerated from win32_volume for those where DriveType = 3) back to win32_physicaldisk instances. Everything that I've seen in my research points to the answer being "it's not possible", but then again, I didn't read the entire Internet. :) I'm currently getting the information out of diskpart, but am running into limitations with that approach.

As a bonus, if the answer is "no, and here's the reason why", that would be useful, too.

I'm attempting to configure powershell remoting on a newly built server and am confused about something. Specifically, the WSMan listener is configured to use port 5985, but when I add the SPN http/computername:5985 computername$, it doesn't take, but when I add the SPN http/computername computername$, it does. How do I configure a server (e.g. a web server) that already has the http SPN assigned to a different account?

I'm trying to get Kerberos authentication to work with a named SQL 2008 instance. I've got it working if I connect to the instance as machine_name\instance_name. However, we have multiple A records in DNS for the same host. When I try to connect to the same instance as other_name\instance_name (where "other_name" is another A record that points to the same IP address as "machine_name"), it falls back to NTLM authentication. I've added the following SPN records:

• MSSQLSvc/other_name:port service_account
• MSSQLSvc/other_name:instance_name service_account
• HOST/other_name machine_name
• HOST/other_name.fqdn machine_name

I don't know where to go from here. Any ideas?

We've been getting the following error a couple of times a day:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found.).

In doing some research, it seems like this is an error resolving the host name to an IP address. What confuses me is that the issue doesn't happen every time. Has anyone seen this issue before? Thanks in advance.