Dell EMC HCI Solutions for Microsoft Windows Server takes advantage of the many new features that come with Windows Server 2019. Some of these features vastly improve on the features and functionality of Windows Server 2016. Each component has a unique impact on the workloads running on Windows Server HCI:
- Data deduplication—This feature enables you to store up to 10 times more data on the same volume with deduplication and compression for the ReFS file system. Deduplication can significantly reduce the amount of storage capacity required in a Windows Server HCI cluster. Datasets that have high duplication—like virtualization libraries—can see optimization rates of up to 95 percent.
- Increased scalability—This feature delivers a four-fold increase in capacity over Windows Server 2016 (400 TB per node and 4 PB per cluster).
- Mirror-accelerated parity—ReFS uses the benefits of mirroring and parity to deliver both capacity-efficient and performance-sensitive storage by combining both resilience schemes within a single volume.
- Cluster sets—This new cloud scale-out technology, which loosely couples a grouping of multiple clusters, enables combining multiple smaller clusters into a single namespace without sacrificing resiliency.
- Persistent memory support—This feature delivers improved performance and lower latency and can be used for cache and capacity.
The following table lists increases to storage limits in Windows Server 2019 compared to Windows Server 2016:
Table 2. Windows Server 2019 improvements to resource limits
Servers per cluster |
16 |
16 |
- |
Drives per cluster |
416 |
416 |
- |
Raw capacity per cluster |
1 PB |
4 PB |
4x |
Raw capacity per server |
100 TB |
400 TB |
4x |
Number of volumes |
32 |
64 |
2x |
Size per volume |
32 TB |
64 TB |
2x |