A new Windows Server build 17074 is now available for testers. The latest preview build includes enhancements to Azure enlightened Failover Clusters, with enhanced eventing on host maintenance events and nodes about to be in host maintenance are excluded from placement. In addition, SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) is no longer required for Storage Spaces Direct to be compatible. Check out full details below.
What’s New in Build 17074 for Windows Server
- Storage Spaces Direct (S2D)
- SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) is no longer required for Storage Spaces Direct to be compatible, this unlocks a breath of new hardware which was not capable of running S2D. Storage Spaces Direct now also supports Persistent Memory (aka. Storage Class Memory), this unlocks a new class of extremely low latency storage which is incredibly interesting in particular as a caching device. Storage Spaces Direct now also supports Direct-connect SATA devices to AHCI controller, again this will expand the hardware ecosystem compatible with S2D as well as unlock a new class of low cost hardware. The latest preview also enabled the Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) Cache is enabled by default, which delivers an in-memory write-through cache that can dramatically boost VM performance.
- Failover Clustering
- Windows Server build 17074 includes enhancements to Azure enlightened Failover Clusters, with enhanced eventing on host maintenance events and nodes about to be in host maintenance are excluded from placement. By making high availability software running inside of an Azure IaaS VM be aware of maintenance events of the host, it can help deliver the highest levels of availability for your applications.
- Dedup support for ReFS and Storage Spaces Direct
Known issues with Windows Server build 17074
- Testing of the Windows core may fail because of a timeout while attempting to load the test libraries.
