Articles From Argon Systems
Building and Maintaining a Microsoft Cloud
Step-by-step technical articles documenting how to deploy and manage a hyper-converged Microsoft cloud infrastructure with Windows Server 2016.
Select a Topic to view articles of just that Topic. Select All to view the entire library.

Configure the Network Ports on a Windows Cluster
Windows clustering requires the network configuration be complete and accurate. The network ports should be configured with IP Addresses, DNS, Default Gateways and any other relevant networking details. The DNS IP address will likely be your Active Directory servers, otherwise you ... continue reading

Creating a Windows 2016 Installer on a USB Drive
Windows Server 2016 can be installed in a similar fashion as the last several releases. In this example we will create a bootable USB drive with Windows Server 2016 available to install. The classic method of creating a Windows Installation USB drive ... continue reading

Create Scale-Out SMB Shares
Now we will create SMB shares on the Windows Scale-Out File Server. Each share will be attached a Virtual Disk. Multiple shares can be created for a Virtual Disk, or you can elect to create only a single share for ... continue reading

Storage Spaces Direct on Windows Server Core
Windows Server Core is a trimmed down version of Windows which has no GUI support. Management of Server Core is accomplished either by command line local to the server, or via GUI utilities from a separate server running Windows GUI ... continue reading

Create the Windows Cluster
We will now create the Windows 2016 or 2012r2 cluster on the domain joined systems. Log onto one of the systems using a domain administrator account. This procedure is run on only one node. Run the following PowerShell command: Test-Cluster –Node node-1,node-2 ... continue reading

Name the Systems and Join to Windows Domain
We are joining the Storage Spaces cluster to a Windows Domain. Join every cluster node to your domain and rename the nodes to match your IT standard naming scheme. This is done in the standard Windows methodology via the Server ... continue reading

Supermicro IPMI and Active Directory Integration
Supermicro IPMI has the ability to use AD to authenticate users without having to add them the IPMI system on each server. Instead of authenticating against the internal IPMI database, it can query AD. Users are identified by a specific security group. Any member is granted access.continue reading

Create Scale-Out File System on Windows Cluster
The Scale-out File System service provides a distributed multi-access service for SMB shares on Windows 2012r2 and 2016. This allows access to network file shares as a service, so access can migrate from node to node, and in some cases allow simultaneous access ... continue reading

Add Storage Spaces as a Cluster Resource
This article will show a step-by-step procedure on how to add Storage Spaces storage and disks as a Windows Cluster Resource on Windows Server 2012r2 and 2016 We will use the Failover Cluster Manager instead of PowerShell for the next operations since these same ... continue reading

Create a Two-Node Windows Cluster
This article describes the steps to create a Two-Node Windows 2012r2 Cluster to be used for storage services as well as host Hyper-V VMs. Both nodes should be domain joined Prerequisite Roles and Features installed (see Windows Cluster and Storage Spaces ... continue reading