In this demonstration, we'll work with Storage Spaces Direct.
Now I'm actually on a Windows 10 administrative workstation here on
which I've installed the Remote Server Administration Tools, so, you
can see I've got my failover cluster up here.
The reason I'm starting on the client is because I think it's useful
to give us a better wide‑spectrum understanding of Storage Spaces
Direct to look at storage spaces that you can run on single Windows
Server and Windows Client machines.
What I'm going to start with is opening up the Disk Management console,
diskmgmt.msc, and let's inspect it.
It looks like I've got one disk available for initialization.
That's not all that much to be totally honest with you.
Looks like I've got one 40GB disk.
I'm going to need to pause the video and add a couple
more disks here to this machine.
Now that's more like it. We're back from the reboot and now we
have three new disks. So this would be similar to you
installing three new disks in your server,
whatever it is, and you know that you'll sign into the server
and if you're going to use a GUI console,
like disk management, we're required first to initialize the disk.
I'm going to do this with Master Boot Record.
That's fine because I don't plan to use traditional primary partition,
extended partition, that's just, you know, that's old‑school stuff.
Likewise, you might be wondering, well hang on a minute,
you're talking about storage spaces now, what about the concept of basic
disks, and dynamic disks, and all that kind of stuff? Yes,
is the answer to the question, and what I mean by that is those terms are
still around for backward compatibility, but you want to avoid the basic
dynamic disks. Before storage spaces, you would convert a disk to be
dynamic so that you could do things like simulating RAID levels. Nowadays
though for both Windows Client and Windows Server, we'll want to use
Storage Spaces Direct.
So it looks like we've got three 40GB drives and one 127GB drive.
Now, they're initialized, they're online, but notice that I've not created
any volumes, they're unallocated, that's really important.
So, what we can do, the UI actually is different for Windows Client than
it is with Windows Server, come to think about it.
Let me do a search for storage spaces, and in Windows Client,
it's a control panel, as you can see, but it's the same general idea.
We can create a new storage pool, and we enlist however many of those
disks we want, I'm just going to bring in three,
create the pool.
We can then start to create volumes.
Well first, we would create virtual disks, and then we would create volumes
from those virtual disks, okay? So the metaphor is that of the pool, that you
then can extract from, that's the metaphor here.
So if I leave everything at the default here,
it looks like we're going to wind up with an NTFS volume,
drive E, with a label of storage space.
I never like spaces, so I'll just call this SS1. For the file system,
it looks like we just have NTFS. On Windows Server,
we have ReFS, the Resiliant File System, and then as I said,
depending upon how many disks you're bringing in,
you can do Simple,
which is just simple striping, a traditional RAID 1 Two‑way mirror,
a Three‑way mirror, or a Parity.
So I'm going to choose Two‑way mirror here, and that's
fine because, well, could I do three?
No,
it says A three‑way mirror storage space requires at least five drives,
so I'm not going to be able to do a three‑way mirror.
And depending upon what kind of parity I want,
I could do a RAID 5 type stripe set with Parity because I do have at
least three drives, but in order to do dual parity,
I think it's at least seven drives.
So let me set this back to Two‑way mirror, and then we can choose, based on
the pool capacity, what the maximum size of the volume is.
Now this is using all available space on all three of those physical
disks, 40x3 is 120, but if we're doing a mirror,
remember that that brings our usable space, it cuts it in half.
So we've got a maximum of 57GB that we can use for our volume,
all right? Now it is possible to overprovision.
As you see down here,
it says, A storage space can be larger than the amount of
available capacity in the storage pool.
But I don't want to play those kind of games, I'm not a gambler,
so I'm going to click Create storage space.
So again, this same motif,
although it's a very different user interface, exists in Windows Server.
Let me see if I can get to Server Manager on this machine.
Yes, I can because I do have all of the RSAT tools installed.
So let me go to All Servers, and let's do Manage, All Servers,
and let's do an enumeration of everything.
Can I do a multi select?
Yes,
I can, so let me bring in my domain controller and my two member
servers, and then we can see the roles that are hosted on those
servers show up at left here. I'm particularly interested in
File and Storage Services. So let's see what we've got here.