In this video from ITFreeTraining, I will
look at how to configure Windows storage spaces
on Windows Server 2012 R2. Windows Storage
Spaces allows you to combine multiple storage
devices to form the one space for performance,
redundancy and administration reasons.
In this video I will look at the following.
First creating a storage pool. When you create
a storage pool you have the choice of either
allowing Windows to automatically allocate
physical disks in the pool to virtual disks,
or doing so manually. I will be having a look
at the advantages of both options.
Next I will look at the different types of
layouts that can be used for virtual disks.
This also includes the new layouts for three-way
mirror and dual parity - included in Windows
Server 2012 R2. Following this, I will look
at how to remove a working physical disk from
the storage pool. In most cases this will
be because the physical disk has failed, however
sometimes you may want to remove a physical
disk that has not failed.
Next, I will look at how to extend a virtual
disk. Essentially this means making the virtual
disk bigger, which you can do at any time.
Next I will look at how to replace a failed
disk in the Storage Pool. Sometimes physical
disks do fail and you want to be able to cleanly
remove the failed disk while ensuring the
storage pool still has the required redundancy.
Lastly, I will look at storage tiers. This
is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2
that allows you to combine mechanical hard
disks and solid state drives together - taking
advantage of speed differences for better
performance. I will now change to my computer
running Windows Server 2012 R2 to look at
how to configure Windows Storage Pools.
To start with, I will first right click on
the start icon, select the option run and
then run DiskMGMGT.msc. This will run Disk
Manager in full screen. Once loaded, notice
that there are 7 physical disks that have
been installed in this system. These physical
disks range in size from 50 Gigabytes to 100
Gigabytes and 200 Gigabytes. The sizes do
not need to be the same to be used with Windows
Storage Spaces.
To configure Windows Storage Spaces, I will
next open Server Manager. Once open, I will
select the option “File and Storage Services”.
This will be installed by default on your
Server.
If I select the option Disks, this shows all
the physical disks that have been detected
on the system. This includes physical disks
that are in use with Windows Storage Spaces
and those that have not been used and cannot
be used, for example: the hard disk used for
the operating system. Windows does not support
booting from Windows Storage Spaces so the
disk containing the operating system cannot
be used with Windows Storage Spaces.
If I select the next option down, Storage
Pools, this will show any storage pools that
have been configured on the system. Currently
there are no storage pools that have been
configured. You will notice that, under Storage
Spaces, the free disks are listed under ‘primordial’.
Primordial essentially means existing from
the beginning of time. Despite the interesting
name they chose for it, essentially Primordial
is all the available physical disks that have
not been allocated to a storage pool as yet.
Although I personally do not think free physical
disks need to be listed under Storage Spaces,
as they are not part of a Storage Space yet,
I think Microsoft’s logic for doing this
is to give you something to right click on
to be able to select the option for New Storage
Pool like this.
Once selected, the new storage pool wizard
will start. Once I am past the welcome screen,
I need to enter in a name and description
for the storage pool. In this case, I will
enter in “General Storage” for the name
and the description.
On the next screen, I need to select which
physical disks I want to use in the storage
pool. In this computer there are 7 available
physical disks and I will select all of them.
None of these physical disks have been used;
so there is no data on them. If your physical
disk does not appear in here, check that all
the data has first been removed from the physical
disk including any volumes.
Notice that there is a pull down option under
‘allocation’. The default is ‘automatic’
which allows the storage pool to use the physical
disks as it sees fit.
The next allocation option is ‘hot spare’.
This option prevents the physical disk from
being used in the pool. The hot spare is only
used if another one of the physical disks
was to fail. As soon as a physical disk fails
in the storage pool, the hot spare will change
to automatic and data from the other physical
disks copied to the hot spare. Thus the hot
spare acts as a spare physical disk and is
only used when another physical disk fails.
The last option, manual, allows the administrator
to select how the physical disk should be
used - rather than have Windows Storage Spaces
make this decision automatically. Notice that,
when this option is selected, an informational
message is displayed at the bottom of the
screen. This message indicates that it is
not recommended to use automatic and manual
allocation in the same storage pool.
To understand why, consider this. If you had
Windows Storage Spaces configured with 7 hard
disks, 4 of these are configured to automatic
allocation and 3 configured for manual allocation,
the following would be happen. Virtual disks
could be created with simple, 2-way mirror
and single parity for both the automatic and
manual allocation. However, 3-way mirror and
dual parity would not be available. This is
because 3-way mirror and dual parity both
require 5 disks. In this case even though
there are 7 hard disks, neither allocation
has 5 disks.
For this reason it is recommend to use automatic
or manual but not both. Later in the video,
I will create some virtual disks in the storage
pool. If you have both automatic and manual
allocations, you will get the following dialog.
On this dialog you will need to select which
allocation to use. You are not able to select
physical disks from both allocations. If you
do not have enough physical disks in the allocation,
this selection will limit what options you
can choose for the virtual disks. You can
see that the advantage of using the manual
setting give the administrator the choice
of which physical disk will be used. This
gives the administrator more control over
which physical disks are used - whereas, with
automatic, the administrator does not need
to worry and Windows will make the required
choices.
In this example, since I want to have all
the physical disks available to me, I will
change the option to ‘automatic’ and move
on. The last screen of the wizard will give
you a chance to confirm the settings. Once
I press create, the Storage Pool will be created.
The Storage Pool does not take too long to
create. Once the storage pool has been created,
I can close the wizard.
Now that the storage pool has been created,
if I right click on the Storage Space, I can
select the option “New Virtual Disk” to
start the new virtual disk wizard. Once past
the welcome screen, I will need to select
which Storage Pool to use. In this case, I
only have the one Storage Pool. However, you
can create as many Storage Pools as you want.
Unless you have good reason to, it is generally
easier to have the one storage pool and place
all your free physical disks in that storage
pool. Windows can support up to 160 physical
disks in the one storage pool.
On the next screen of the wizard, I will enter
in a name and description of the virtual disk
as ‘simple disk’.
On the next screen, the layout of the virtual
disk needs to be decided. I have 3 types to
choose from. In this case I will select simple.
There is more information about the layout
on the right of the screen. Simple layout
will divide the data from the virtual disk
amongst all the disks in the virtual pool.
This gives the virtual disk excellent read
and write performance - however, offers no
redundancy. If any physical disk in the storage
space was to fail, you would lose all the
data in the simple virtual disk. For this
reason, simple disks are usually used for
temporary storage space or data that is easy
to recover if lost. Often they will be used
for video files since high read performance
is required and since videos are generally
static, once crated they are easy to back
up.
On the next screen, you can decide the provisioning
that is used for the virtual disk. The default
“fixed” will create a virtual disk the
same size as what you specified. For example,
if you enter in 100 Gigabytes, 100 Gigabytes
of space in the storage space will be used.
If you select the first option “thin”,
which I will do in this case, the virtual
disk will only use a small amount of initial
space. As data is added to the virtual disk
it will get bigger. Thin provisioning is a
good choice when you require multiple virtual
disks and you are not sure what your storage
needs will be. It allows the virtual disk
to grow as your needs grow - and stay small
if the space is not required.
On the next screen, I need to enter in the
size of the virtual disk, in this case I will
enter in the value of 50 Gigabytes. Once I
enter in this value and move on, I will be
at the last screen of the wizard where I can
press ‘create’ to create the virtual disk.
The virtual disk should not take too long
to create. Once created, I can close the wizard,
and the new volume wizard will start up. This
will allow me to format the virtual disk and
configure a volume label on it.
Once I am past the welcome screen, the wizard
will display the server and virtual disk that
is to be used.
On the next screen, I need to enter in the
size for the volume that I want to create.
In this case, I will accept the default option
which will use all the available disk space
in the virtual disk.
The next screen will allow me to select which
drive letter I want to use. In this case I
will accept the default of E drive and move
on.
The next screen allows some formatting options
to be entered in. In this case, I will enter
in the volume label as Simple Disk and move
on.
The next screen will allow me to confirm the
options that I entered in and, once I press
create, the virtual disk will be formatted
and available to the operating system for
use. The process should not take too long
to complete. Once complete, I will close the
wizard and then go back to Disk Management.
Notice the new virtual disk has appeared as
drive E. Also notice that the other 7 physical
disks, that were displayed here earlier, have
disappeared. Once the physical disks have being
managed by Windows Storage Spaces, they no
longer appear in Disk Management.
I will now go back to Server Manager and create
a second virtual disk by selecting the option
“New Virtual Disk” under the tasks menu
in the virtual disks section.
The procedure is the same as before. I will
go past the welcome and storage pool selection
screens until I get to the Virtual Disk Name
screen. On this screen, I will enter in the
name and description which, in this case,
will be “Mirror Disk”.
Once I move onto the next screen, I will select
the layout for this virtual disk as Mirror.
On the right is information about mirror.
To use it, you need a minimum of 2 disks that
will keep running after one disk has failed.
If you want to use a 3-way mirror, this will
keep running after 2 physical disk failures.
On the next screen, you can choose 2-way or
3-way mirror. The option for three-way mirror
will only appear if there are enough physical
disks in the Storage Space to support it,
and you are running Windows Server 2012 R2.
In this case, I will select three-way mirror
and move on.
The next option gives the choice of thin or
fixed provisioning, from which I will select
‘thin provision’ again and move on. On
the next screen, I will enter in the size
as 30 Gigabytes. Notice at the bottom of the
screen is an information message stating that
the virtual disk may use some additional space
for write-back cache. This improves performance
of the virtual machine and is used on mirror
and parity virtual disks.
On the next screen I can check the settings
used, before pressing the create button to
create the virtual disk. Once the wizard has
completed and the virtual disk has been created
the new volume wizard will launch itself again.
The wizard is the same as last time so I will
accept all the default options until I get
to the file system setting screen. Once I
enter in the volume label of Mirror Disk,
I will change the file system to ReFS. Windows
Storage Spaces integrates with ReFS taking
advantage of its features. ReFS is designed
to be a self-healing file system and corrects
problems as they occur without having to unmount
the file system. There are some features not
implemented in ReFS that were included in
NTFS and thus you should see if you require
these features before making the switch. The
most noticeable missing features are EFS,
compression and disk quotas.
With the options configured, I will now complete
the wizard and the volume will be created
on the virtual disk with the ReFS file system.
Now that the volume has been created, I will
go back to server manager and select the option
“New Virtual Disk” to create the last
virtual disk with the parity layout.
Once again, I will go through the wizard accepting
the default options and setting the name and
description to “Stripe Disk” as this is
effectively a striped disk with parity.
In hindsight it would have been better to
call this virtual disk “Parity disk”.
On the next screen, I will select the option
for layout as Parity. On the right side of
the screen is information stating that the
parity option requires a minimum of 3 physical
disks, but needs 7 physical disks if you want
to protect the virtual disk for 2 physical
disk failures.
Since I have enough physical disks, on the
next screen I have the option of “Single
Parity” or “Dual Parity”. In this case
I will leave it on the default option of “Single
parity” and move on to the next screen.
Notice on the next screen I have the option
of fixed or thin provisioning. Rather than
move on in the wizard I will instead move
back to the previous screen of the wizard.
On the previous screen I will select the option
“Dual parity” and move on to the next
screen. Notice that the option for thin is
now grayed out. If you want to use “Dual
parity”, you will only be able to use the
fixed provisioning type.
On the next screen I need to enter in the
size of the virtual disk which, for this case,
I will enter in 20 Gigabytes and move on in
the wizard. Now that the wizard is complete,
I will press ‘create’ and create the last
virtual disk type.
On the final screen of the wizard, I will
de-tick the option “Create a volume when
this wizard closes”. This will create the
virtual disk; however, no file system will
be created on the virtual disk. This step
will need to be performed later on - using
disk management.
Since I have created some virtual disks in
the Storage Space, it would be good to get
an indication of how much space has been used.
To do this, right click the Storage Space
and select the option properties.
Once the properties are open, notice that
there is a bar indicating how much space is
currently being used in the Storage Space.
If I select the health option, notice that,
at the top, the health status is indicated
as Healthy and the operational Status is listed
as o.k.
If I go back to server manager, I can get
some additional information about each virtual
disk. If there are any problems with the virtual
disk, they will show up here, and also you
can see how much space is being used for the
write-back cache.
On the right hand side you can see the physical
disks that are present in the storage pool.
If I select one of the disks and right click
on it, I have the option to remove the disk.
Perhaps you want to replace the disk with
a larger one or maybe it is starting to fail.
When I attempt to remove the physical disk
I will get a message indicating that Windows
will attempt to rebuild the storage pool using
the other physical disks in Storage Pool.
If there is enough data from the other physical
disks in the system, it will be able to do
this.
Notice however that when I attempt to do this
I get a message stating the operation could
not be completed because a simple disk existing
on the physical disk. Simple disks have no
redundancy and will spread their data out
using the available physical disks in the
storage pool. If you use the simple disk layout,
make sure you are aware that you will not
be able to remove physical disks from the
Storage Pool later on unless the simple disk
is removed first. This is another reason why
simple disks tend to only be used for temporary
data or for data that is easy to restore.
In order to remove the physical disk, I will
first remove the simple disk. Notice that
when I right click on the simple disk and
select the option “Delete Virtual Disk”,
I will get a message indicating that the volume
on the virtual disk needs to be removed before
the virtual disk can be deleted.
To do this, I will go back to Disk Management,
right click Simple Disk and select the “Delete
Volume” option. Once I confirm that this
is what I want to do, the volume will be deleted.
Now if I go back in Server Manager, next I
need to go up to Tasks and select the option
to refresh. Once the screen has refreshed,
I can now right click on the simple disk and
select the option “Delete Virtual Disk”.
Now that the simple disk has been removed
I will now attempt to remove the disk. Once
I select the “Remove Disk” option, I will
get a message indicating that Windows will
attempt to move all the data from this physical
disk and store it on other physical disks
in the Storage Pool. Notice that when I press
yes I will get another message indicating
that the process was not successful.
Windows will attempt to move the data to other
physical disks in the storage pool while making
sure the required redundancy is kept on the
virtual disk. In this case, the storage pool
has a dual parity configured which requires
7 physical disks as minimum to operate. I
have 7 physical disks in the storage space
so if I remove one, the dual parity virtual
disk will not be able to operate at the required
redundancy level as it requires 7 physical
disks. To get around this, I first need to
add another physical disk to the system. When
removing physical disks from the system you
need to consider if, once the physical disk
is removed, will there still be enough physical
disks in the system with free space available
to ensure the required redundancy level is
maintained. If this is not the case, the operation
will fail.
To remove the physical disk, I will first
install another free physical disk to replace
it. To do this, I will pause the video for
a moment while I install another physical
disk so don’t go anywhere; I will be right
back.
Now that the extra physical disk has been
installed, I will go up to tasks and select
the option “Rescan Storage”. A message
will appear indicating this may take a while
to complete and other tasks may not be available
while this is occurring. I am happy to wait
so I will press yes to continue.
Notice now, if I select Primordial, I can
see the physical disk I just installed on
this system. If I right click on the Storage
Pool, I will select the option “Add Physical
Disk”, and add this physical disk to the
Storage Pool. It is just a matter of ticking
the physical disk and making sure that the
allocation option is configured to “Automatic”.
Once I press o.k., the physical disk will
be added to the Storage Pool and I will now
be able to remove the physical disk that I
attempted to remove earlier. Notice that once
I press yes, Windows will change the usage
of the physical disk to retired.
Windows has removed the physical disk but
has given an information message indicating
that you should not make any additional changes
while it is still servicing the Storage Space.
Essentially Windows Storage spaces is still
making some changes, however this should not
take too long as there is no data stored on
the virtual disk.
The next feature that I would like to point
out is that a virtual disk can be made bigger
after it has been created. To do this, right
click the virtual disk and select the option
“Extend Virtual Disk”. Once selected,
it is just a matter of entering in the size
that you want to extend the virtual disk to.
There is, however, no option to shrink a virtual
disk.
Once I select o.k. notice that Disk Management
will take focus since a change has been made
to one of the physical disks in the system.
You can see the Mirrored virtual disk is now
60 Gigabytes and is divided into two parts.
The virtual disk has been extended; however,
the volume on the virtual disk is not using
all the free space since it was originally
created when the virtual disk was smaller.
To use all the free space, I will right click
on the volume and select the option “Extend
Volume” to launch the extend volume wizard.
Once past the welcome screen, on the next
screen I can enter in the size I want to extend
the virtual disk to. Notice that by default,
it is configured to 60 Gigabytes and, thus,
will use all the remaining space. I also
have the option to combine multiple disks
together. I will not be doing this as I believe
it is better to combine multiple disks together
using Windows Storage Spaces rather than using
Disk Management.
Once that wizard has been completed, the virtual
disk will now be using all the free space.
So you can see that extending a virtual disk
is a 2 step process.
If I go back to Server Manager, what I will
do next is show you how to replace a failed
hard drive. To demonstrate this, what I will
do is remove one of the physical hard disks
from the computer. Once I have removed the
physical disk, I will go up to tasks and perform
a refresh.
Notice that, under Physical Disks, the first
physical disk now has an exclamation mark
next to it, indicating that the computer can
no longer communicate with it.
Also notice at the top there is an exclamation
mark next to the storage pool, indicating
a problem, and also an exclamation mark under
virtual disks. Since there is redundancy in
the Storage Pool, the virtual disks will be
able to operate even after the loss of one
physical disk.
If I open the properties for the Storage Pool
and then go to health, notice that the operational
status of the physical disk has changed to
‘degraded’. To get the Storage Pool operating
again at a healthy state, I need to replace
the failed physical disk.
If I go back to server manager and right click
one of the failed virtual disks and select
the option “Repair Virtual Disk”, Server
Manager will accept the command, however the
virtual disk still has an exclamation mark
next to it. Windows is not able to repair
the virtual disk due to there not being the
required number of physical disks in the system
to maintain redundancy.
If I select Primordial, notice that the physical
disk that I removed earlier is available so
I can use that physical disk to replace the
failed one. So I will right click the storage
space and select the option “Add Physical
Disk” and select that physical disk. The
difference this time I will set the allocation
to Hot Spare rather than automatic. This tells
Windows that this physical disk has been configured
to replace any physical disks in the system
that are failing.
Once I have added the physical disk, notice
that it appears with the others, except the
usage is marked as “Hot Spare”. If I once
again right click a physical disk and select
the option “Repair Virtual Disk”, this
time notice that the physical disk is being
repaired. The process does not take too long
in this case because the virtual disk has
not had any data put on it.
Notice that the physical disk is still listed
as “Hot Spare”; however, if I go to tasks
and perform a refresh, notice that the physical
disk has changed to automatic. If I now select
the second virtual disk, I can select the
option “Repair Virtual Disks” and this
virtual disk will also be repaired.
Once it has completed, notice that the physical
disk that I removed from the system is now
reported as “Retired”. This means that
the physical disk can safely be removed from
the system which I will now do.
The last feature that I will look at is Storage
Tiers in Windows Storage Spaces. This feature
is only available in Windows Server 2012 R2.
Storage Tiers allows you to divide your virtual
disk into a solid state part and a second
part that will use traditional mechanical
hard disks. Windows will automatically optimize
data so the data that is used more often is
stored on the solid state drives rather than
the mechanical drives - improving performance.
If I look at my Physical Disks, notice that
each one currently has status of “Unknown”.
Hopefully, your physical disks will detect
correctly and will not appear as “Unknown”.
If this is the case, you can configure the
“Media Type” using PowerShell; so I will
now open PowerShell from the quick launch
bar to do this.
The first command that I will run is Get-PhysicalDisk.
This will show all the physical disks currently
To do this, I will press up to get the last command
and then add pipe followed by “where FriendlyName
dash Like” and then “PhysicalDisk”.
Notice that to select disks 2 through 4 I
will add 2 dash 4 in square brackets. When
I run this command notice that it will show
physical disks 2, 3 and 4.
I next need to use the output from this command
and pass it to another command. To do this,
I will once again retrieve the pervious command
and, this time, add the pipe command followed
installed in the system. I want to take the output from
this command and filter out physical disk 2 through to 4.
by “Set-PhysicalDisk dash MediaType HDD”.
Once I run this command it will configure
disks 2,3 and 4 as hard disks.
0:30:10.000,1193:02:47.295
Disk 1 was removed due to failure and disk 0
holds the opreating system.
Now that this is done, I want to change disks
5 through to 8 to solid state. To do this,
I will retrieve the previous command and change
the media type to SSD and then cursor back
and change “2 to 4” to “5 to 8”. Once
the change has been made and the command has
been run, disks 5, 6, 7 and 8 will now be
solid state drives.
If I now exit out of PowerShell and perform
a refresh in Server Manager, notice that the
disk Media Types have now changed.
To create a new virtual disk using tiers,
I will right click on the Storage Space and
select the option new virtual disk. I will
accept the default options in the wizard until
I get to the screen ‘virtual disk name’.
On this screen, I will enter in the name and
the description “Tier Drive”.
To create a Tier virtual disk, I need to tick
the option “Create storage tiers on this
virtual disk”. This option was previously
not available as a media type of my physical
disks was not configured.
Once I move onto the next screen, I will need
to select the provision type. Simple and mirror
are available; however, parity is not. In
this case, I will select mirror and move on.
On the next screen, I can choose two-way or
three-way mirror. I will keep the default
option of two-way mirror and move on.
On the next screen, notice that thin provisioning
is not available and there is also an information
message at the bottom of the screen explaining
this. This also applies to the simple layout.
Unfortunately, if you choose tier storage
you are limited to fixed provisioning.
On the next screen I need to decide how large
the virtual disk should be. Notice that there
are two parts, the SSD part and the HDD part.
For the SSD (or faster) Tier, I will enter
in 20 Gigabytes and for the HDD (or standard)
tier, I will enter in 60 Gigabytes. Notice
that, down at the bottom of the screen, the
total size of the virtual disk is listed as
80 Gigabytes.
Once I press next and then press create, the
virtual disk will be created using tier storage.
Once the virtual disk has been created. If
I go back to server manager, notice the “Tier
drive” has been added and a tick has been
added to tier storage. The “Tier drive”
is now ready to go.
That covers it for Windows Storage Spaces.
Quite a long video but I am sure you can see
the advantages and features that Windows Storage
Spaces provides. Thanks for watching and I
hope to see you in other free videos from
us.
