Why I Love Windows Server 2012 Part 4 – Storage Space by Richard Qi

14 Dec 2012

What is Storage Space?

Storage Space in the nutshell is storage virtualization. It allows you to turn commodity server into a storage server almost like a SAN.

Why Does Storage Space Matter?

One important reason to virtualize is to have high availability, but it can be expensive. You always needed a share storage – SAN. Storage Space provides the SAN-like capabilities for your cluter or standalone server. Let’s face it, many organization cannot afford to have SAN everywhere. This provides a great alternative and allow IT to enable more high availability across the entire infrastructure. For small and medium size organization, IT can leverage it to have a enterprise grade deployment.

Benefits and Limitations

Some of the goals of Storage Spaces include the ability to:

Obtain and easily manage reliable and scalable storage with reduced cost
Aggregate individual drives into storage pools that are managed as a single entity
Utilize simple inexpensive storage with or without external storage
Provision storage as needed from pools of storage you’ve created
Grow storage pools on demand
Use PowerShell to manage Storage Spaces for Windows 8 clients or Windows Server 2012
Delegate administration by specific pool
Use diverse types of storage in the same pool: SATA, SAS, USB, SCSI
Use existing tools for backup/restore as well as VSS for snapshots
Designate specific drives as hot spares
Automatic repair for pools containing hot spares with sufficient storage capacity to cover what was lost
Management can be local, remote, through MMC, or PowerShell

It is also possible to utilize Storage Spaces with Failover Clusters. However, with clusters you are limited to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) as a storage medium. Failover clustering does not support Storage Spaces using other storage technologies. Just because the list above mentions USB as a capability doesn’t mean use of USB storage on a server with other faster storage in the same pool is a good idea. Use of USB in a pool may be more practical on a Windows 8 client or while developing a proof of concept. Performance of this technology depends also on the performance capabilities of the storage you choose to pool together.

With goals in mind, below are some additional limitations:

Not supported on boot, system, or CSV volumes
Drives must be 10GB or larger
When you introduce a drive into a storage pool, the contents of the drive being added will be lost.
Add only un-formatted/un-partitioned drives
A simple storage pool must consist of at least one drive
A mirrored pool must have at least 2 drives. For 3-way mirroring there is an obvious need for more
Three drive minimum for using Parity
All drives in a pool must use the same sector size
Fibre-channel and iSCSI are not supported
Storage must be storport.sys compatible
Virtual disks to be used with a failover cluster that emanate from a storage pool must use the NTFS file system. ReFS or third-party file systems may be used for other purposes

How to Configure?

Install the File and Storage Services Features from Server Manager. Once installed click on the File and Storage Services from Server Manager.

Click on Tasks under storage pool to create a new storage pool. Before creation, please make sure there are unallocated Disks available. Otherwise, you will not be able to create storage pool.