Hello, Cloud Gurus, and welcome back.
In this lesson, we're going to take a look
at how you can use File Server Resource Manager,
more commonly referred to as FSRM.
Let's take a look at what we're going to cover.
First up, I'll introduce FSRM and all of its capabilities
and then we'll take a look at some of the requirements
and see how you can install and manage FSRM,
and then we'll wrap up with a demo
of some of the most commonly used FSRM capabilities.
Let's get started.
So what is File Server Resource Manager?
Well typically, when you're managing file servers
that are accessed by your users,
you're going to run into a range of problems.
One problem that you might face
is users consuming too much space on a file server.
Well, FSRM allows you to configure quotas
and these quotas are different to simple NTFS quotas,
which can only be configured per volume.
With FSRM quotas, you can configure the quota
for a folder or a volume,
and you can also set hard and soft limits.
Hard limits being a limit that blocks access
and soft limits being a limit that provides a warning
and you can provide notifications, for example, using email.
You also might face a situation
where users are uploading files
that are not supposed to be stored on the file server.
For example, uploading music to a file server
that's supposed to be used to store documents.
File Server Resource Manager helps manage this issue
by providing file screens,
which block content based on the file extension
and you can also create exemptions
to allow one specific file type where required.
Users might also not treat files
with specific classifications as they should be treated.
For example, not ensuring confidential information
is only accessed by those requiring access.
File classification infrastructure
allows you to provide metadata for a file
and this is stored in the file properties
and these can be a range of data types,
including true false values or a date.
And then you can create a file classification rule
that controls which classifications
are assigned to files automatically.
You also might want to view a report
of the storage utilization on your file server
so you can provide that to your management teams.
Storage reports enable you to generate information
about the type and nature of files being stored
on the file server by creating report tasks.
You also might need to archive or expire files
once they've reached a certain age.
File management tasks allow you
to perform operations on files
based on a range of conditions.
And finally, you might want to provide specific assistance
for your users when they are denied access
to a specific file or directory
or attempt to perform an action
that is blocked by File Server Resource Manager.
Access-denied assistance can be used
to provide this custom message
when users encounter this issue.
All right, let's take a quick look at installing
and managing File Server Resource Manager
and there aren't too many requirements to use FSRM,
but one got you to be aware of
is that FSRM can only be used with NTFS-formatted volumes.
So if you want to use FSRM,
you can't use the newer ReFS file system.
And you'll also require an email server
for some of the notification capabilities
that FSRM provides.
Now, FSRM is a Window Server role service,
part of the file server role and as with all role services,
you can install it using a range of options,
including server manager and PowerShell
by installing the FS-Resource-Manager role service
and there is a remote server administration tool as well,
named RSAT, FSRM management.
And you can manage FSRM
using either the FSRM management console
or by using PowerShell
with the File Server Resource Manager module.
All right, let's take a look
at a demo of configuring File Server Resource Manager.
We have a new file server, CORP-BNE-FS01
that we've deployed in a previous lesson.
In this demo, we'll take a look at using FSRM
to take better control of the file server.
There is a file share named data that points to R:\Data,
so we'll use this for our demo.
We will install the FSRM role service.
Then we will create a folder quota.
We'll also test that newly created folder quota
and then we will create a file screen
to block audio and video files
and we'll wrap up by testing our file screen.
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 install File Server Resource Manager
and to do that, we're going to use
the Install-WindowsFeature PowerShell cmdlet
and we'll provide the feature name of FS-Resource-Manager
and we'll include the management tools as well.
And this will just take a moment to install,
so we'll come back when this is done.
All right, that's now installed.
Now, let's go ahead and create a folder quota
and to do that, we're going to use
the File Server Resource Manager management console.
So we'll go ahead and launch administrative tools.
And then we'll launch File Server Resource Manager.
All right, and we want to create a folder quota,
so we'll navigate into quota management
and then we'll navigate into quota templates.
And now let's have a look
at the 2 gigabyte limit quota template.
So we'll right-click on that
and select Edit Template Properties.
And we can see here that this template is providing a quota
to limit users to only 2 gigabytes of storage
to any directories or volumes that this quota applies to.
And it's using a hard quota,
so users are not allowed to exceed the limit,
but it could alternatively use a soft quota if it wanted to.
And it will email users
when they're approaching their quota
and it will also log an event log entry.
All right, let's use this to create our own quota.
So we're going to go ahead and click Cancel
and then we'll navigate to quotas
and we'll right-click and select New Quota.
And we're going to apply a quota to our folder
and we're going to use R:\Data as our folder.
And see that you can automatically apply quotas
to existing new and subfolders and this is really useful
if you want to apply a quota to users' profile folders
when they're automatically created in this directory;
for example, if you were using profile redirection
to redirect users' profiles to this server,
then you could automatically apply a quota
to each individual sub folder for that user.
Now, that's not really a topic
that you'll need to know for the exam,
but it is a really good use case
for auto applying templates.
Now, let's go ahead and use the 100 megabyte limit quota
and then we'll go ahead and select create.
All right, now let's test our folder quota.
To do that, we're going to use PowerShell,
so I'll switch back to PowerShell.
Now, we're going to use the fsutil command
and this is a file server utility command-line tool,
but you don't need to know fsutil for the exam,
but it does have one handy function
that is useful for testing these scenarios
and that is its ability to create dummy files
or blank files.
We're going to create a dummy file
about 90 megabytes in size and to do that,
we're going to use the fsutil command
with the file, create new parameters
and we're going to specify a file
in our R:\Data directory
and specify a file size of about 90 megabytes.
And you have to do that in bytes,
so there's just going to be a lot of zeros on the end here.
We'll go ahead and create that dummy file.
All right, now let's go ahead
and try and create another file,
so I'll just press the Up arrow key
and I'll just change this to Test2
to create a separate file,
and then we'll go ahead and run that.
And we can see we're being thrown back an error,
indicating that there is not enough space on the disk.
And we know that this disk
has more than 100 megabytes of space,
but in this instance, we're being blocked by the FSRM quota.
All right, now let's take a look at creating a file screen,
so we're going to navigate back
to the FSRM management console
and then we'll navigate into file screening management
and then we'll select File Groups.
And you can see here, we have a file group
that indicates all of the file types
that would normally be associated
with audio and video files.
Let's prevent audio and video files
from being stored on our file share.
To do that, we'll navigate to File Screen Templates
and templates are used to preset
what files will be blocked
and how they will be blocked,
either actively by preventing users
from saving the files or just passively monitored
and what actions will be taken
when a blocked file action is attempted.
We already have a block audio and video files template.
So we can use that for our example.
Let's open that template.
And we can see that it uses the audio
and video files file group.
We'll go ahead and click Cancel.
Now let's create a file screen.
So we'll right-click on File Screens
and select Create File Screen.
We'll type the path as R:\Data
and then we'll use our template,
which is block audio and video files.
And then we'll go ahead and create
to create our file screen.
All right, now let's test our file screen
and we'll do that using PowerShell.
So I'll jump back to PowerShell
and now let's go ahead and try and create
an MP3 file on that directory.
To do that, we'll use the fsutil command again
and I'll just press the up arrow key
to get the previous command
and then we're just going to change this to an MP3 file
and we'll change the file name as well.
And we'll change the size
to make sure we don't hit the quota.
And we'll just make a really small dummy MP3 file
and we can see that we're getting access denied.
So File Server Resource Manager
is preventing us from saving the MP3 file to that directory.
Now let's go ahead and try and create
a Word document instead,
so I'll just press the up arrow key
and I'll change the extension
to the extension that's used for Microsoft Word documents,
which is docx and I'll use that same small file size.
And we can see that we're able
to successfully create the test file.
So we can see that the file screen
is blocking those audio and video files
and allowing us to save the document files
that we would expect to be saved on that share.
All right, that concludes this demo.
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?
File Server Resource Manager
assists with managing Windows file servers
and File Server Resource Manager
can be managed using both PowerShell
and File Server Resource Manager management console.
And you can do this locally on the server or remotely
using an administrative server or workstation.
And File Server Resource Manager
requires an NTFS formatted volume
so you can't use FSRM with ReFS.
And FSRM quota management can be used
to ensure storage space is not excessively used.
FSRM quotas can be associated with volumes or folders.
Standard NTFS quotas that we didn't cover in this lesson
cannot be applied to folders.
And file screens can be used
to ensure only appropriate file types
are uploaded to your file servers,
protecting you from users saving things
like their personal media collection.
All right, that concludes this lesson.
I hope you found it useful and thanks for being with me,
and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.