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Didier Van Hoye
Didier Van Hoye
Didier Van Hoye is an IT veteran with over 17 years of expertise in Microsoft technologies, storage, virtualization and networking. He works mainly as a subject matter expert advisor and infrastructure architect in Wintel environments leveraging DELL hardware to build the best possible high performance solutions with great value for money. He contributes his experience and knowledge to the global community as Microsoft MVP in Hyper-V, a Veeam Vanguard, a member of the Microsoft Extended Experts Team in Belgium and a DELL TechCenter Rockstar. He does so as a blogger, author, presenter and public speaker

All posts by Didier Van Hoye

Posted by Didier Van Hoye on December 27, 2018
Is Microsoft really considering an acquisition of Mellanox?

Carsten Rachfahl and I were working in the lab together last week. In the evenings during our end of year self-improvement hackathon. We had both seen the rumor that Microsoft was considering buying Mellanox. While we love Mellanox and Microsoft technologies I have mixed feelings about the rumor. It’s no secret that I use Mellanox cards and switches to deliver on our quest for excellence. Not because we make money from selling Mellanox but because they deliver great value for money. Their NICs and switches allow me to have 25Gbps at a cost and quality level traditional network companies won’t allow.

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on November 15, 2018
Windows Server 2019 introduces a new SMB Mapping Option UseWriteThrough

A standard SMB share leverages caching to make things work fluently. Hiccups are hidden and file processing appears to go fast as caching often makes things looks faster than they are under the hood. For the vast majority of knowledge worker applications that support working against a file share, i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and many other tools this works fine. For software that requires and is dependent on an absolute guarantee data is consistent and persisted at all times this is not enough. Backups to file shares are one such use case. If the SMB Shares “lies” to the SMB client that all is written to storage but it is actually still cached things can go wrong.

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on September 27, 2018
Does low latency, high throughput & CPU offloading require RDMA?

Does low latency, high throughput & CPU offloading require RDMA? What? Blasphemy, how dare we even question this? In my defense, I’m not questioning anything. I am merely being curious. I’m the inquisitive kind. The need for RDMA is the premise that we have been working with ever since RDMA became available outside of HPC InfiniBand fabrics. For us working in the Windows ecosystem this was with SMB Direct. Windows Server 2012 was the OS version that introduced us to SMB Direct, which leverages RDMA.

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on April 24, 2018
SMB Direct – The State of RDMA for use with SMB 3 traffic (Part III)

The RDMA wars in regards to SMB Direct: RoCE versus iWarp.

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on April 17, 2018
SMB Direct – The State of RDMA for use with SMB 3 traffic (Part II)

The Flavors of RDMA & what role DCB plays.

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on April 12, 2018
SMB Direct – The State of RDMA for use with SMB 3 traffic (Part I)

What is RDMA and why do we like it.

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on February 14, 2018
Replacing a Veeam Agent for Windows host while preserving existing local or share backups

Imagine you have a server with data source volumes that are backed up to local (or a share) target backup volumes with Veeam Agent for Windows (VAW). You might or might not backup the OS as well. That server is old, has issues or has crashed beyond repair and needs to be replaced. You don’t really care all that much about the server OS potentially but you do care about your data backup history! You don’t want to lose all those restore points. Basically, we try to answer how do you replace the backup server when it’s a local Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 deployment.

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on December 5, 2017
Using a VEEAM off-host backup proxy server for backing up Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Hosts

Many years ago, I wrote a white paper on how to configure a VEEAM Off-host backup proxy server for backing up a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster that uses a hardware VSS provider with VEEAM Backup & Replication 7.0.  It has aged well and you can still use it as a guide to set it all up. But in this article, I revisit the use of a hardware VSS provider dedicated specifically to some changes in Windows Server 2016 and its use by Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5 or later. The information here is valid for any good hardware VSS provider like the one StarWind Virtual SAN provides (see Do I need StarWind Hardware VSS provider?)

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on November 21, 2017
Take a look at Storage QoS Policies in Windows Server 2016

In Windows Server 2016 Microsoft introduced storage Quality of Service (QoS) policies.  Previously in Windows Server 2012 R2, we could set minimum and maximum IOPS individually virtual hard disk but this was limited even if you could automate it with PowerShell. The maximum was enforced but the minimum not. That only logged a warning if it could be delivered and it took automation that went beyond what was practical for many administrators when it needed to be done at scale. While it was helpful and I used it in certain scenarios it needed to mature to deliver real value and offer storage QoS in environments where cost-effective, highly available storage was used that often doesn’t include native QoS capabilities for use with Hyper-V.

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Posted by Didier Van Hoye on October 12, 2017
SMB Direct in a Windows Server 2016 Virtual Machine Experiment

Ever since Windows Server 2012 we have SMB Direct capabilities in the OS and Windows Server 2012 R2 added more use cases such as live migration for example. In Windows Server 2016, even more, workloads leverage SMB Direct, such as S2D and Storage Replication. SMB Direct leverages the RDMA capabilities of a NIC which delivers high throughput at low latency combined with CPU offloading to the NIC. The latter save CPU cycles for the other workloads on the hosts such as virtual machines.

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