In this demo, I'm going to cover Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2022.
I'm on a domain member server named localmem1,
and I'll start by bringing up my Disk Management console.
And what I have here, you can see down at the bottom my Disk 3,
4, and 5, I have three SCSI disks.
And you do have to make sure that you've initialized the disks in
Windows Server so that they actually are registered,
but in order to give the storage over to Storage Spaces,
you have to make sure that the disk layout hasn't been formatted,
so you don't want to create any volumes.
So I'm going to start by creating a storage pool,
and I'm going to create a virtual disk that brings in these first two disks,
and then we'll add the third just to play around with it a little bit.
And the way I'm going to do this is I'll come into Server Manager and
then just start at the beginning at the Dashboard.
I've come down to File and Storage Services making
sure I've got a couple machines here.
Let me make sure I'm on my correct machine,
LOCALMEM1, and then let's go to Volumes,
Storage Pools.
And you'll see that, if you haven't configured a storage pool,
you have what's called a Primordial pool,
and that just means preexisting or always there.
Kind of mysterious.
Well,
we're going to move beyond the Primordial pool by aggregating some
of our physical disks that we can see down below.
So I'm going to take these two 60‑GB SAS drives,
we're going to do a Tasks, New Storage Pool.
This kicks off the New Storage Pool Wizard.
I'm going to verify the server, give the pool a name,
I'll call this localmeme‑pool1, click Next.
We choose what disks we want to include,
and then for Allocation, this allows us to do Manual,
Automatic, or Hot Spare.
Check the exercise files for more information on how you can
use Storage Pool to come back from a disaster using Hot
Spare and using the Parity types.
We don't need to go to that level of depth for the purpose of the exam.
I'm just going to select the two members that I want to start with.
I'll leave Allocation at Automatic, and then we'll click Next.
Confirmation.
All right.
So we've got 60 + 60 is 120 GB, and then we create the pool.
Nice.
Let's close up.
And now we have our Storage Pool up here,
and if we right‑click, we've got a few options.
We can add a physical disk if we have one that shows
up in the Physical Disks list, we can add new virtual disks,
we could delete the pools,
or we can go to the properties where we can verify capacity,
we can take a look at just quick health status,
and then we can look at a bunch of specific properties.
It's kind of strange this interface that makes you choose,
one at a time, each of these details, but there you have it.
I know that you could use PowerShell to do some reporting.
And then I'll show you Windows Admin Center.
That's yet a third way to go, all right?
So, I have the storage pool that consists of two physical disks.
If I come back to Primordial,
we can see the third disk that is not part of the pool.
I'm going to select the pool,
and now let's go New Virtual Disk because the pool is just
meant to be just like the metaphor of a pool,
it's a body of storage,
and then we can take a partition of that pool and create virtual disks.
That's what we're going to do right now.
So let's select the storage pool in question, click OK.
And that kicks open the New Virtual Disk Wizard.
So let's click Next.
I'm going to call this virtual disk project‑disk1.
If you want to do storage tiers, you can select this,
but notice that it says down at the bottom that this is going to be
grayed out unless your pool has at least one SSD,
and I just have HDD mechanical storage,
so I'm not going to be able to take advantage of storage tiers here,
but that's the control that you see.
Let's click Next.
I'm not using a separate external enclosure, so I'm going to click Next.
This is important.
This gives us our options for storage layout,
and this is going to affect how much available
space will be in your virtual disk.
Mirror says the data is striped across your physical disks,
creating either two or three copies of your data.
Parity options gives you the protection against one or two disk failures.
And notice, it says to protect against a single disk failure,
you need at least three physical disks, and to protect against two disk failures,
you need at least seven physical disks.
Mirroring two‑way is going to be two physical disks,
three‑way is going to need at least five disks,
all right?
Simple is just maximizing capacity and increasing throughput due to striping,
disk striping, but it's not going to give us any reliability or protection.
I'm going to choose that, in this case.
Then we can do either Thin or Fixed provisioning.
Now depending upon your need for predictable I/O, you may decide to go Fixed.
That's going to be an optimization that's beyond our scope,
but something to think about.
If you're really concerned about space,
you could do Thin provisioning that says the volume uses
space from the storage pool only as needed,
up to the volume size.
And yes, you can increase or decrease the size of a volume as well.
I'm just going to create a very small 10‑GB drive,
click Next, and then let's click Create.
Great!
So now we have a new virtual disk, and when we finish that wizard,
it launches yet a third wizard.
Now, again, the paradigm is important for you to understand.
The pool allows you to create virtual disks,
and the virtual disk is a stand in for a physical disk,
and it's unusable unless you've created at least one volume.
The volume's going to give us our file system and our drive letter.
Although, technically, you could mount your volume to a folder,
that's an NTFS feature that's been around for a long time,
but I'm going to go old school and use a drive letter.
So let's click Next, verify our server, verify our project virtual disk,
click Next.
What size?
I'm going to use it all.
Next.
Drive letter or a folder mount.
Nope, I'm going to do a drive letter.
Next.
File system can be NTFS or ReFS.
I'm going to actually choose ReFS here.
I will use the default allocation size, and for a new volume,
I will call this project‑disk1, and then click Next.
Are we going to do data deduplication to save even more disk space?
Well, we're going to learn about this in the next module,
so I'll leave that disabled.
We can always enable it at a later time if we want to.
Let's click Next and then Create to finish creating the New Volume Wizard.
Nice.
So at this point, we could come back to Disk Management,
and let me do a Rescan Disks,
and now you can see I have my project disk that's mounted at drive G.
It is a 10‑GB ReFS volume.
I can right‑click Open, and it's now fully usable, okay?
Now, how does this look from the context of Windows Admin Center?
Let me pop into my Edge browser, and I'm going to hop into localmem1,
which is my current machine.
Let's connect in.
And then let's search our Tools for storage.
And if we come down to the Storage node,
unfortunately, at this point,
Windows Admin Center doesn't support Storage Spaces.
It's just basically giving us Disk Management capabilities.
As you can see, we can enumerate our disks,
and we can do some of the operations that we could
through the Disk Management console,
so we can look at our Disks view and our Volumes view,
but that's about it.
Actually, if I select my project‑disk, notice that we can resize the volume,
we can edit volume properties, if you're using File Server Resource Manager,
we can create quotas, but it looks like,
at this point, we don't have full‑scale Storage Spaces access yet.
That having been said,
remember that we can always come to Settings and go to Extensions,
and then, if we do a search,
maybe we'll find eventually that maybe Microsoft or a third‑party contributor,
maybe you, creates an extension that integrates with Storage Spaces.
So, anyway, that's that.
Let me come back here.
Basically what you have in Windows Admin Center is that you can do
Storage Spaces direct with Cluster Manager because clustering is a
workload that is supported here in WAC.
Now let me go back one more time to that server,
localmem1, and I just want to show you, again,
if we do a search for storage,
we can do Storage Replica in the GUI if we don't
want to use PowerShell to do it.
And similar in paradigm to what I showed with the PowerShell,
it's about creating what's called a partnership,
and we can create our replica partner with an
existing server or VM that's on‑prem, this is an on‑prem machine by the way,
or we could use a new Azure VM to do a hybrid storage replica.
That's pretty interesting.
And then to set it up, as you can see here,
you give your replication group a name,
and then you specify your local volume and local log volume,
destination server name, replication group name,
volume and log volume, and then there will,
at that point, be some additional options,
what kind of replication, whether you need encryption,
all of that kind of stuff.
So we don't need to go further.
I just wanted to show you this in Windows Admin Center for the sake of completeness.