Good day, Cloud Gurus,
and welcome back for this lesson
where we're going to review the fundamentals
of Windows Server Storage.
Let's take a look at what we're going to cover.
First up, we'll review a decent number
of Windows Server Storage concepts
to make sure we're all on the same page
and up to date with the latest best practices.
And then we'll take a closer look
at the 2 file management systems available on Windows,
and we'll also briefly cover off
the storage management tools.
And then finally, we'll do a demo
where we will configure Windows Server Storage.
Let's get started.
Now, we all know that files and folders stored
on Windows computers are store on disks,
but what we also should remember,
is that there are a few layers
between the disk and the files and folders on that disk.
Let's review these technologies
and decisions at a high level and then we'll dive
into some of the more important decisions
in detail later in this lesson.
Now, it all starts with the disk media
and the disk can either be a traditional spinning disk,
which we refer to as a hard disk drive
or it can be solid-state based storage,
more commonly referred to as SSD.
Now, these days you're more likely to be dealing with SSD,
but hard disk drive media still exists
in very large or legacy storage requirements
due to the lower cost for capacity.
And this disk is then attached to the computer
using a disk interface
and there are quite a few ways to attach a disk.
Some of the more common disk interfaces
include Serial AT Attachment or SATA,
Small Computer System Interface or SCSI,
or Serial Attached SCSI, referred to as SAS,
or it can be storage area network technologies,
like Internet SCSI, ISCSI, or even Fibre Channel.
Now I know you might be thinking,
"Come on Wayne, this is really basic stuff,"
but we need to review this,
because this foundational knowledge impacts so much
of how you will use and manage storage in Windows Server.
For example, some Windows Server features
require what's referred to as shared storage
and other Windows Server features
require direct attached storage.
For our purposes, SATA and SAS are direct attached.
SCSI, ISCSI, and Fibre Channel are considered shared.
Now, there are also 2 disk storage types
supported on Windows, basic and dynamic disks.
Dynamic disks are rarely used these days,
so you'll only need to know about basic disks for the exam,
but be aware that in the real world,
you may come across dynamic disks
and they were historically used for disk redundancy
using some additional volume types
that we'll cover in just a moment.
And you'll also need to decide
on a partition style for your disks.
There are 2 partition styles available on Windows,
GUID Partition Table, or GPT,
or Master Boot Record, referred to as MBR.
All you really need to know here,
is that modern hardware and operating systems use GPT
and it is also the default.
And then there is the disk volume.
Only simple volumes are available on basic disks.
A simple volume is a disk partition
formatted with a file system.
And we'll take a look at file systems just up next.
And if you're not familiar with a partition,
it's basically just a section of a disk
and volumes are also typically assigned a drive letter.
And finally, we'll put our data,
which are our files, organized into folders on the volume.
Now, mirrored disks are supported by Microsoft
to mirror boot volumes,
but all other dynamic disk volume times,
like spanned and striped are considered deprecated,
so don't use them.
And finally, you'll need to decide on a file system.
A file system is a set of rules
that control the structure
of how data restored and retrieved.
And there are 2 file systems to choose from on Windows
for the purposes of hosting file servers
and each of these file systems
have some advantages and disadvantages.
So let's explore those in more detail now.
All right, let's take a closer look
at the 2 file systems that are available to you
when you are configuring disk volumes
for your server workloads.
The first and oldest of the two you have to choose from,
is NTFS, which stands for New Technology File System,
although it's not so new anymore.
NTFS is considered the primary file system for Windows
and it's considered the primary file system,
because it has support for the most features available
on Windows Server, including encryption and compression
at the file system level
and capacity control with quotas and NTFS also supports
the most Windows Server roles and features.
NTFS can also be used for both operating system boot volumes
and data volumes.
And for quite a while, there was only NTFS,
but then with the release of Windows Server 2012,
Microsoft introduced ReFS,
which stands for Resilient File System.
And the resiliency is where Microsoft
has made the investments in this newer file system.
ReFS offers improved protection against corruption
and supports much larger volumes.
NTFS is limited to 8 petabytes,
whereas ReFS maxes out at 35 petabytes,
but ReFS is not supported on operating system boot volumes
or removable media.
ReFS also has a large number of limitations
around Windows Server features.
And this list is fairly long.
ReFS isn't supported with Active Directory
domain services databases
and if you're using cluster shared volumes with ReFS,
it has some performance considerations to be aware of,
and there are also a few features
that we'll cover later in this section
that are not supported when using ReFS.
This includes distributed file system and data deduplication
on earlier versions of Windows Server.
You need to have at least Windows Server 2019
if you want to use data deduplication with ReFS
and File Server Resource Manager,
which we'll cover later in this section
is also not supported on ReFS volumes.
Now, like most Windows Server features,
the management tools are scattered
all around Windows Server.
There are a few noteworthy management consoles
to be aware of though.
The disk management console provides
a range of functionality for configuring disks and volumes
and some storage features,
like File Server Resource Manager
include their own management consoles.
And there are also a range of command-line tools available.
Some older tools like the disk part command-line utility
and the storage module for PowerShell
are both worth mentioning.
And Windows Admin Center also provides
a range of functionality for managing storage,
including a default extension
that provides all of the features
of the disk management console
and Windows Admin Center also has extensions
for some of the newer Windows Server features
and Azure features, such as storage replica.
And like most of the Windows Server roles and features,
some of the newer and more advanced functionality
is only available in either PowerShell
or Windows Admin Center.
And as we work through this section,
I'll call that out so you can be aware
of when you must use a specific management tool.
All right, let's take a look at a demo
of configuring Windows Server Storage.
In this demo, we're going to deploy a new file server,
CORP-BNE-FS01 and configure storage on that server.
We'll start by installing the file server role,
which doesn't actually install anything
since all storage management tools
are included on Windows Server by default,
but it will configure the Defender Firewall rules
required for that file server.
And then we'll configure a newly attached disk
from the start to finish
and take a look at some of the configuration steps
we covered in this section.
Let's take a look.
All right, so here we are on our file server,
CORP-BNE-FS01 and we're going to go ahead
and install the FS file server Windows feature
and we'll include the management tools.
And I'll just go ahead and tab complete
that IncludeManagementTools parameter.
So we can go ahead and run that now.
And this will go ahead and enable
the Defender Firewall rules
that'll allow clients to connect to this file server.
This will just take a moment to install,
so we'll come back when this is done.
All right, the installation is now complete
and I've gone ahead in the background
and attached a new disk to this server,
so let's use the disk management console
to set up the new disk.
Now, you can manage your disks
through the disk management console,
which is included in the computer management console,
or you can launch the disk management console directly,
or you can manage the disks through Server Manager.
We'll take a look at just launching
the disk management console directly.
So I'll type the shortcut for the disk management console,
which is diskmgmt.msc.
All right and we can see that disk management
has detected that we've attached a new disk
and that disk is not initialized.
So let's go ahead and initialize the disk.
And we know that all modern hardware
will support the GUID partition style,
or GPT partition style, so we'll go ahead and select that.
And then click OK.
And I'll just expand this window
so we can take a look at the newly attached disk
down the bottom.
The next step is to bring the disk online
and because this disk is using direct attached storage,
this disk has already been brought online
by disk management for us
and we can see that it's brought it online as a basic disk.
If we wanted to convert the disk to a dynamic disk,
we could right-click the disk
and say Convert to Dynamic Disk,
but there's not too many times
when you're going to be doing that these days.
Now, let's go ahead and create a volume on this disk.
So we'll right-click the unallocated space
and we'll select New Simple Volume.
We'll go ahead and select Next.
We'll use the full size of the disk.
We'll go ahead and click Next.
We'll assign a drive letter of F for this disk
and we'll go ahead and select Next.
And here we can choose the file system.
Now, we could choose NTFS or ReFS
or some of the older FAT or FAT32 formats.
For our purposes, we'll go ahead and use ReFS
and we'll provide a name for the volume.
I'm just going to use the name data.
And it's also going to perform a quick format on this volume
to create the file system.
So we can go ahead and click Next.
And then we can go ahead and click Finish.
All right, we now have a volume available
that's accessible via the F drive.
It's using the ReFS file system
and it's a basic data partition on a basic disk.
All right, that concludes this demo.
Now, let's wrap up with a bit of a summary
of what we've covered in this lesson.
All right, so what have we covered?
SATA and SAS disk interfaces
are considered direct attached storage
and Windows Server will automatically
bring these disks online when you connect them to a server,
whereas SCSI, ISCSI, and Fibre Channel
are considered shared storage
and these disks won't automatically
be brought online by Windows Server
and you should use the GPT partition style
for all modern computers,
and despite all of the options available
when you configure storage on Windows Server,
you should use simple volumes
on basic disks wherever possible.
And the NTFS file system is required
for a range of Windows Server features,
including boot volumes
and file-level encryption and compression.
All right, thanks for being with me in this lesson,
I hope you found it useful
and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.