Hello, Cloud Gurus,
and welcome back for this lesson
where we're going to explore the latest options available
for improving the resiliency of Window storage.
So let's take a look at what we're going to cover.
In this lesson, we're going to focus
on improving the resiliency of storage locally
within a server.
And in future lessons, we'll explore additional options
that use multiple servers to improve resiliency.
First up, we'll take a look at an overview of Storage Spaces
and then we'll explore how Storage Spaces work.
And then we'll wrap up
with a demo of configuring Storage Spaces.
Let's jump in.
Now, storage is a critical piece of your infrastructure,
and getting storage that is reliable, fast,
and has the required capacity has long been a costly
and complicated process.
And again, storage that was resilient enough
to suffer the failure of individual disks
and even entire trays of disks often meant purchasing
and configuring expensive and complicated storage arrays,
which we call storage area networks or SANs.
And storage area networks are sometimes
so complicated to set up and maintain
that entirely new roles were created
called storage administrators.
Storage Spaces is a storage virtualization feature
available on both Windows clients
and Windows Server operating systems to provide a low cost
and simple alternative to storage area networks.
Storage Spaces allows you to pull together
a variety of inexpensive disks and use those disks
to provide many of the capabilities of a SAN
without the associated complexity and cost.
And this includes providing a range
of redundancy options to protect against failure
including things like mirroring and hot spare disks.
And Storage Spaces also provides tiering capabilities
for tiering data between lower capacity fast storage
and higher capacity slow storage
for optimal performance and capacity.
And Storage Spaces also provides
improved capacity utilization with SAN
like thin provisioning.
Storage Spaces starts with a group
of direct attached disks in a server.
And these are sometimes referred to as JBOD
or just a bunch of disks.
And the disks must be exactly that.
They must be configured not to use rage storage controllers
and must be connected using a direct attached interface
like SAS, and they must be unformatted and non-partitioned.
And from there, you group your disks into a collection
of physical disks by creating a storage pool.
Each disk can only belong to one storage pool,
but the storage pool can contain a mixture
of different disk capacities and types
like solid state disks and hard disk drives,
and all disks must have the same sector size.
And if the term sector size is new to you,
it's basically the smallest chunk of data
that can be written to a disk.
If you have a sector size of 4 kilobytes,
then when you write a 3 kilobyte file,
it consumes 4 kilobytes on the disk.
And then you create one or more virtual disks
using the storage pool.
The virtual disk is what's referred to as a storage space,
and the virtual disk defines a range
of configuration options, including the storage layout,
which determines the resiliency and the performance.
And that is how you want the data to be written
to the disks.
And there are a few ways you can do this
including creating a simple storage space,
which provides the best possible performance
across one or more disks or by creating a mirror,
which provides redundancy by writing data
across 2 or more disks, or by creating a virtual disk
with parity with 3 or more disks.
And if you've never heard the term "parity" before,
in very simple terms, you can think of it like this:
On the first disk, you write the number 1
and on disk 2, you write the number 2
and then on disk 3, you write the number 3.
And if you lose any of those disks,
your storage system can work out
which number is missing by performing a calculation.
And that calculation is referred to as parity.
And you can also tier your storage to improve
the capacity and performance of your virtual disk.
There are 2 tiers available,
fast SSD and slow high capacity non-SSD.
Files are automatically moved between tiers
and this happens by default at 1:00 AM.
But you can also force a file to a specific tier
by pinning that file to a tier.
And there is also support for write-back caching
where a sudden burst of disk activity
will automatically written to the fast disk tier.
And finally, the virtual disk provisioning type
determines how data is allocated on the physical disks
and both thin and fixed provisioning are available.
And these are similar to dynamically expanding
and fixed virtual hard disks that we took a look at
when we explored Hyper-V.
And like Hyper-V, virtual hard disks
that are thin provisioned may have slower performance.
And then you go ahead
and create one or more volumes using your virtual disk,
and you can select to format the volume using
either ReFS or NTFS to create a file system.
And you'll typically assign a drive letter.
All right, let's take a look at a demo
of configuring Storage Spaces.
We have a new file server CORP-BNE-FS01
that we deployed in the previous lesson.
And we've gone ahead and connected 3 disks
to this server, and we want to use Storage Spaces
to create a redundant,
3-way mirrored storage space, virtual disk.
We will do this by first creating a storage pool
using the 3 direct attached disks,
and then we'll create a virtual disk
using our new storage pool,
and then we'll create a volume using that virtual disk.
And finally, just for some fun,
we'll simulate the failure of a disk
and observe the results.
Let's take a look at the demo.
All right, so here we are logged onto CORP-BNE-FS01,
and we're going to go ahead and use server manager
to configure Storage Spaces on this server.
Now let's get started by creating a storage pool
and to do that, we're going to navigate
into File and Storage Services and then Disks.
And we can see we have 3 data disks attached
to this server.
Each disk is 10 gigabytes in size
and as using the SAS disk interface.
And that means that windows has automatically brought
these disks online,
and because they're direct attached disks,
we can use them in Storage Spaces.
All right, let's create our storage pool.
We'll navigate into storage pools,
and on the top right-hand corner, we'll select Tasks,
and then we'll select a new storage pool.
We'll go ahead and click Next
and we'll just call the storage pool, Data Disk Pool.
And then we'll go ahead and click Next.
And we'll select all of the disks
that are currently attached to this server,
and we could change them to a hot spare
if we wanted to, but we're going to leave the allocation
as automatic for each of these disks.
We'll go ahead and click Next,
and then we'll go ahead and hit Create.
This will just take a moment to complete.
All right, we now have our storage pool created.
And one of the nice features
about configuring Storage Spaces using server manager
is that the wizard's chained together.
So we can select the option to create
a virtual disk when this wizard closes.
So we'll go ahead and do that,
and then we'll go ahead and click Close.
Now let's go ahead and create a virtual disk.
So we'll go ahead and select our data disk pool,
and then we'll click OK.
We'll go ahead and select Next.
Let's go ahead and call this virtual disk, Data Disk.
And we could use storage tiers
if we had a mixture of disk types like SSD and HDDs,
but for our purposes,
we don't have a mixture of disk types
so we're going to go ahead and select Next,
and we don't have a disk enclosure
so we're going to go ahead and select Next.
Now we're going to go ahead and create a mirror,
which provides higher availability
but decreases capacity.
We could opt for the simple storage layout
if we wanted to increase performance,
or we could opt for the parity layout if we wanted to have
a good mixture of capacity and redundancy.
But for our purposes, we'll select Mirror,
and then we'll go Next.
We're going to thin provision the volume,
and then we'll go ahead and select Next.
And we're going to create a 10 gigabyte volume,
and then we'll go ahead and select Next.
And then we can go ahead and select Create.
And Microsoft knows that you're going to want
to create a volume after you've created virtual disk,
so it's automatically selected that option for us.
So we're going to go ahead and click Close,
and then we'll continue with creating our volume.
We'll go ahead and select Next.
And we can see that we have our server selected
and our new virtual disk selected.
So we can go ahead and select Next.
We'll create a volume at the maximum size and select Next.
We're going to use the drive letter S
but you could use any drive letter you wanted.
We'll go ahead select Next.
And we're going to use NTFS for the file system because
we want to use some of the advanced features available
in Windows Server in future lessons in this section.
We'll also leave the default allocation size,
and we'll just provide a name of Data.
We'll go ahead and select Next,
and then we'll go ahead and click Create.
We'll go ahead and click Close.
Now let's go ahead and refresh Server Manager.
We'll go ahead and select our Data Disk Pool,
and we can see we have our Data Disk, virtual disk,
and the physical disks that that data disk is using.
Now I'm going to go ahead and fail one of the disks,
and we'll come back and take a look at what happens.
All right, I've gone ahead and disconnected
the third disk from our storage pool.
Let's go ahead and refresh Server Manager.
And we can see that our data disk
is degraded because we're missing one of our disks,
but we're still able to access the volume.
Let's go ahead and test that now.
So I'll just launch File Explorer.
We'll navigate into this PC,
and then we'll navigate into S drive.
We'll go ahead and create a dummy file.
And as we can see,
we're still able to access the volume as expected.
And because this virtual disk is using a 3-way mirror,
we could lose up to 2 of these disks
before it impacted our ability to access this storage.
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?
Storage Spaces allows you to pull together
a variety of inexpensive disks to provide resilient storage
for your Window service.
And Storage Spaces requires
direct attached, unformatted disks using either SAS
or the SATA disk interface.
And Storage Spaces' virtual disks
support 3 storage layouts.
Simple for highest capacity and performance,
mirror for best redundancy, and parity
for a good mix of redundancy and capacity.
And there are 2 tiers available to improve performance.
SSD for fast solid state disks
and hard disk drives for slower spinning disks.
And data is tiered automatically every evening
or you can pin files to a specific tier.
And if you remember back when we explored differencing disks
in Hyper-V, if you are using differencing disks,
the parent disk is a great candidate
to pin to the fast tier.
And there are 2 provisioning types available
with Storage Spaces.
They are both thin and fixed provisioning.
All right, that concludes this lesson.
Thanks for being with me.
I hope you found this useful,
and I look forward to seeing you on the next lesson.