If go to MEM1 storage, we're going to see quite a bit going on.
This is because I've already set up Storage Spaces Direct.
So again, I've selected the server. I've gone into File and Storage Services,
Storage Pools. And the way that we would set up a singleton instance
of storage space is not Storage Spaces Direct,
but Storage Spaces traditionally, is that you would enumerate your
physical disks down here, and you would create a pool.
Now normally in Windows Server, you have a default pool called
the primordial or primordial pool. And then we can right‑click
and add physical disks to that pool, and those available disks
would be enumerated down here.
Another thing we could do,
I mentioned this actually a little while ago, is we could use PowerShell
to report on disks and their status. For instance,
let's take a look at this snippet of PowerShell.
Let me bring up my terminal here.
I showed you this pipeline before, Get‑PhysicalDisk, and then we
can select out whatever properties we want to see. Particularly, we
want to see whether we CanPool, CannotPoolReason. But let me select
this, right‑click, run it.
Yeah, so in this case,
these three disks originally I'm sure would've reported back as CanPool True,
but now they're false simply because they're in a pool. It looks like I
do have that fourth disk that is still in a true status, so I can always
add that to the storage pool on my single workstation. And this last disk
here would be my system drive. There's insufficient capacity, so I can't
add that to the pool.
So like I said,
this gives us a view from the perspective of a single cluster
node showing us the physical disks. Actually, because it's kind
of confusing because this, again,
is showing us Storage Spaces Direct, even though it doesn't say,
well, it does. It says Clustered Windows Storage. So it's implied
here that this is Storage Spaces Direct.
Well look,
instead of just talking through how Storage Spaces behaves on a
Windows server, why don't we actually check it out?
We're looking at the desktop of one of my read‑only domain controllers.
And so we're just going to repeat the same kind of stuff we did
on the client, but I think it's important for you to see this on
both the client and the server both.
So here we can see the disk management shows I've got three disks, but
these, because they come in by default on Windows Server is offline,
we're not prompted to initialize, so we've got a couple steps. I'm going
to right‑click and bring these guys online first by right‑clicking in
their headings, and then we're going to, again, right‑click to do an
initialized disk, and then we see the screen that we saw on the client
machine.
So now these disks are ready for Storage Spaces or Storage
Spaces Direct, depending upon what you're doing. So again, let me bring up Server Manager.