Recently, I was dealing with an HCI cluster and I needed to see how the slabs (or extents, if you prefer) are placed on each disk. Since there is no such direct PowerShell command to visualize this information, I ended up writing a small function that serves this purpose. The function performs some queries on the virtual disk to find the slubs, calculate the statistics and correlate with the hosts that hold each disk. In the end, it groups the results and returns them in a single table.
Continue reading View Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) slabs placement statistics
Azure Diagnostics for Virtual Machines is a great feature. You have visibility for syslog, CPU usage, memory usage, boot diagnostics, etc. It is great to have it. But if you have used it for a while, you may find yourself in the uncomfortable place to have collected too much data, that have launched storage costs to undesirable heights. At least at this point in time, Microsoft does not offer retention mechanisms for diagnostic data. One quick and dirty way to get rid of it is to completely wipe the diagnostics data and start from scratch. There is no way to throw away just the old data. It is all or nothing. 
Recently I needed to monitor the free disk space on some Linux VMs on Azure. Each VM had a different VM size, which means different OS Disk size, Temp partition size, etc. In addition, some VMs had an extra Data disk, while some others did not. The aim was to monitor and create alerts for each partition separately. This is something that Azure does not offer out of the box. Instead, it requires some extra effort to achieve this. Since I realized that there is actually not good enough documentation on the net, I decided to share my experience hoping that it will be helpful for others too.