How to Configure Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) Cache

by Muhammad Imran Habib · August 3, 2017

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For each CSV, EnableBlockCache is enabled by default by the Windows Server 2012 R2. You may want to disable the caching for some CSVS in order to focus resources on important ones. Below mentioned are the steps for configuring cluster shared volumes (CSV) Cache.

The CSV Cache can be configured only from the PowerShell as there isn’t any GUI option available. Run “(Get-Cluster).BlockCacheSize” in order to know about the amount of RAM which is reserved for each cluster member for the CSV Cache. This command can be run on any cluster member. EnableBlockCache is synchronized across each node cluster because it is a cluster-wide setting.

Now, we will run the command so that the size of CSV Cache per cluster is set. Run the command “(Get-Cluster).BlockCacheSize = 512” so that every cluster member is configured to use 512 MB for caching.

To make use of the cache, enable the selected CSVs in Windows Server 2012 R2. The CSVs of WS2012 use the cache by default. To know about caching status of a CSV, you can run the following command in the PowerShell. The value of 1 indicates that caching is enabled, the value of 0 indicates that caching is disabled.

The next command is used to enable CSV Cache for CSV1. If you change the CSvEnableBlockCache value to 0, then the caching will be disabled.

To monitor usage and performance of CSV Cache, there are a number of metrics available. All the counters are available in Performance Monitor under the Cluster CSV Volume Cache.

These metrics can be added so that the amount of optimization provided by CSV Cache can be determined and so that the size of CSV Cache can be tuned for the cluster.