Configure Disks and Volumes.
I think the purpose of this exam objective is just to make sure
you understand the fundamental vocabulary.
Specifically,
a disk is going to be our physical storage devices in Windows Server.
We're talking about connection technologies like SCSI, SAS, SATA.
And these physical storage devices can be partitioned.
In fact, you're going to create one or more partitions on these disks,
and then those partitions can then in turn be created as volumes.
What is a volume?
A volume is nothing more than a formatted disk partition.
This is going to be where the operating system lays
down a file system like NTFS or ReFS, and in Windows,
you wind up with a drive label and a drive letter that serves as
the mount point for that volume in the OS.
Why do I say this?
Well, it really feeds in as a nice entree into the rest of this lesson.
You might have heard of dynamic disks if you've been with Windows for a while.
There used to be a distinction between basic disks and dynamic.
And dynamic unlocked things like software RAID and stretched volumes and so on.
But you should know, if you don't already know,
that dynamic disks are deprecated both in Windows Server and Windows client,
and we just keep disks in the basic orientation.
There still is the capacity to do dynamic and basic.
I think that's just there for backward compatibility.
Microsoft recommends if you have any servers with dynamic
disks, you convert them back to basic.
Now rather than just deal with disks and volumes one at a time,
we're concerned with ways that we can do mirroring and striping and parity,
the so‑called redundant array of independent disks or RAID configurations.
But at the same time, we have to remember that we're dealing with number one,
Microsoft and Microsoft Windows specifically,
so we're not going to be dealing with third‑party hardware OEMs.
Number two, we have to think that we're in a hybrid cloud orientation,
so we're doing software‑defined volume management that
potentially we could do with our Azure VMs,
as well as those that we manage on‑premises, whether those are VMs or physical servers.