1 00:00:00,940 --> 00:00:05,420 In this demo, I'm going to cover Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2022. 2 00:00:05,420 --> 00:00:07,990 I'm on a domain member server named localmem1, 3 00:00:07,990 --> 00:00:11,430 and I'll start by bringing up my Disk Management console. 4 00:00:11,430 --> 00:00:14,740 And what I have here, you can see down at the bottom my Disk 3, 5 00:00:14,740 --> 00:00:17,120 4, and 5, I have three SCSI disks. 6 00:00:17,120 --> 00:00:20,540 And you do have to make sure that you've initialized the disks in 7 00:00:20,540 --> 00:00:23,340 Windows Server so that they actually are registered, 8 00:00:23,340 --> 00:00:26,800 but in order to give the storage over to Storage Spaces, 9 00:00:26,800 --> 00:00:31,330 you have to make sure that the disk layout hasn't been formatted, 10 00:00:31,330 --> 00:00:33,480 so you don't want to create any volumes. 11 00:00:33,480 --> 00:00:36,390 So I'm going to start by creating a storage pool, 12 00:00:36,390 --> 00:00:40,370 and I'm going to create a virtual disk that brings in these first two disks, 13 00:00:40,370 --> 00:00:43,640 and then we'll add the third just to play around with it a little bit. 14 00:00:43,640 --> 00:00:47,290 And the way I'm going to do this is I'll come into Server Manager and 15 00:00:47,290 --> 00:00:49,490 then just start at the beginning at the Dashboard. 16 00:00:49,490 --> 00:00:52,430 I've come down to File and Storage Services making 17 00:00:52,430 --> 00:00:54,280 sure I've got a couple machines here. 18 00:00:54,280 --> 00:00:56,690 Let me make sure I'm on my correct machine, 19 00:00:56,690 --> 00:00:59,790 LOCALMEM1, and then let's go to Volumes, 20 00:00:59,790 --> 00:01:00,960 Storage Pools. 21 00:01:00,960 --> 00:01:04,350 And you'll see that, if you haven't configured a storage pool, 22 00:01:04,350 --> 00:01:06,400 you have what's called a Primordial pool, 23 00:01:06,400 --> 00:01:09,340 and that just means preexisting or always there. 24 00:01:09,340 --> 00:01:10,590 Kind of mysterious. 25 00:01:10,590 --> 00:01:10,810 Well, 26 00:01:10,810 --> 00:01:14,780 we're going to move beyond the Primordial pool by aggregating some 27 00:01:14,780 --> 00:01:17,470 of our physical disks that we can see down below. 28 00:01:17,470 --> 00:01:21,490 So I'm going to take these two 60‑GB SAS drives, 29 00:01:21,490 --> 00:01:24,080 we're going to do a Tasks, New Storage Pool. 30 00:01:24,080 --> 00:01:26,340 This kicks off the New Storage Pool Wizard. 31 00:01:26,340 --> 00:01:29,730 I'm going to verify the server, give the pool a name, 32 00:01:29,730 --> 00:01:33,460 I'll call this localmeme‑pool1, click Next. 33 00:01:33,460 --> 00:01:35,830 We choose what disks we want to include, 34 00:01:35,830 --> 00:01:39,960 and then for Allocation, this allows us to do Manual, 35 00:01:39,960 --> 00:01:41,900 Automatic, or Hot Spare. 36 00:01:41,900 --> 00:01:45,750 Check the exercise files for more information on how you can 37 00:01:45,750 --> 00:01:49,600 use Storage Pool to come back from a disaster using Hot 38 00:01:49,600 --> 00:01:52,140 Spare and using the Parity types. 39 00:01:52,140 --> 00:01:55,680 We don't need to go to that level of depth for the purpose of the exam. 40 00:01:55,680 --> 00:01:59,560 I'm just going to select the two members that I want to start with. 41 00:01:59,560 --> 00:02:03,260 I'll leave Allocation at Automatic, and then we'll click Next. 42 00:02:03,260 --> 00:02:04,170 Confirmation. 43 00:02:04,170 --> 00:02:04,680 All right. 44 00:02:04,680 --> 00:02:10,300 So we've got 60 + 60 is 120 GB, and then we create the pool. 45 00:02:10,300 --> 00:02:10,880 Nice. 46 00:02:10,880 --> 00:02:11,840 Let's close up. 47 00:02:11,840 --> 00:02:14,130 And now we have our Storage Pool up here, 48 00:02:14,130 --> 00:02:16,750 and if we right‑click, we've got a few options. 49 00:02:16,750 --> 00:02:19,630 We can add a physical disk if we have one that shows 50 00:02:19,630 --> 00:02:23,370 up in the Physical Disks list, we can add new virtual disks, 51 00:02:23,370 --> 00:02:24,620 we could delete the pools, 52 00:02:24,620 --> 00:02:28,650 or we can go to the properties where we can verify capacity, 53 00:02:28,650 --> 00:02:31,430 we can take a look at just quick health status, 54 00:02:31,430 --> 00:02:34,500 and then we can look at a bunch of specific properties. 55 00:02:34,500 --> 00:02:37,400 It's kind of strange this interface that makes you choose, 56 00:02:37,400 --> 00:02:40,480 one at a time, each of these details, but there you have it. 57 00:02:40,480 --> 00:02:43,290 I know that you could use PowerShell to do some reporting. 58 00:02:43,290 --> 00:02:45,280 And then I'll show you Windows Admin Center. 59 00:02:45,280 --> 00:02:47,070 That's yet a third way to go, all right? 60 00:02:47,070 --> 00:02:51,320 So, I have the storage pool that consists of two physical disks. 61 00:02:51,320 --> 00:02:52,960 If I come back to Primordial, 62 00:02:52,960 --> 00:02:56,270 we can see the third disk that is not part of the pool. 63 00:02:56,270 --> 00:02:57,750 I'm going to select the pool, 64 00:02:57,750 --> 00:03:01,730 and now let's go New Virtual Disk because the pool is just 65 00:03:01,730 --> 00:03:04,350 meant to be just like the metaphor of a pool, 66 00:03:04,350 --> 00:03:06,840 it's a body of storage, 67 00:03:06,840 --> 00:03:11,840 and then we can take a partition of that pool and create virtual disks. 68 00:03:11,840 --> 00:03:13,120 That's what we're going to do right now. 69 00:03:13,120 --> 00:03:16,850 So let's select the storage pool in question, click OK. 70 00:03:16,850 --> 00:03:19,340 And that kicks open the New Virtual Disk Wizard. 71 00:03:19,340 --> 00:03:20,570 So let's click Next. 72 00:03:20,570 --> 00:03:24,280 I'm going to call this virtual disk project‑disk1. 73 00:03:24,280 --> 00:03:27,590 If you want to do storage tiers, you can select this, 74 00:03:27,590 --> 00:03:30,760 but notice that it says down at the bottom that this is going to be 75 00:03:30,760 --> 00:03:35,300 grayed out unless your pool has at least one SSD, 76 00:03:35,300 --> 00:03:37,870 and I just have HDD mechanical storage, 77 00:03:37,870 --> 00:03:41,190 so I'm not going to be able to take advantage of storage tiers here, 78 00:03:41,190 --> 00:03:42,860 but that's the control that you see. 79 00:03:42,860 --> 00:03:43,900 Let's click Next. 80 00:03:43,900 --> 00:03:47,930 I'm not using a separate external enclosure, so I'm going to click Next. 81 00:03:47,930 --> 00:03:48,900 This is important. 82 00:03:48,900 --> 00:03:51,230 This gives us our options for storage layout, 83 00:03:51,230 --> 00:03:53,250 and this is going to affect how much available 84 00:03:53,250 --> 00:03:55,570 space will be in your virtual disk. 85 00:03:55,570 --> 00:03:59,220 Mirror says the data is striped across your physical disks, 86 00:03:59,220 --> 00:04:02,140 creating either two or three copies of your data. 87 00:04:02,140 --> 00:04:06,500 Parity options gives you the protection against one or two disk failures. 88 00:04:06,500 --> 00:04:09,610 And notice, it says to protect against a single disk failure, 89 00:04:09,610 --> 00:04:14,410 you need at least three physical disks, and to protect against two disk failures, 90 00:04:14,410 --> 00:04:16,820 you need at least seven physical disks. 91 00:04:16,820 --> 00:04:20,000 Mirroring two‑way is going to be two physical disks, 92 00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:23,010 three‑way is going to need at least five disks, 93 00:04:23,010 --> 00:04:23,450 all right? 94 00:04:23,450 --> 00:04:29,490 Simple is just maximizing capacity and increasing throughput due to striping, 95 00:04:29,490 --> 00:04:33,520 disk striping, but it's not going to give us any reliability or protection. 96 00:04:33,520 --> 00:04:35,220 I'm going to choose that, in this case. 97 00:04:35,220 --> 00:04:38,000 Then we can do either Thin or Fixed provisioning. 98 00:04:38,000 --> 00:04:42,360 Now depending upon your need for predictable I/O, you may decide to go Fixed. 99 00:04:42,360 --> 00:04:45,480 That's going to be an optimization that's beyond our scope, 100 00:04:45,480 --> 00:04:46,820 but something to think about. 101 00:04:46,820 --> 00:04:49,290 If you're really concerned about space, 102 00:04:49,290 --> 00:04:52,110 you could do Thin provisioning that says the volume uses 103 00:04:52,110 --> 00:04:54,570 space from the storage pool only as needed, 104 00:04:54,570 --> 00:04:55,910 up to the volume size. 105 00:04:55,910 --> 00:04:59,870 And yes, you can increase or decrease the size of a volume as well. 106 00:04:59,870 --> 00:05:03,170 I'm just going to create a very small 10‑GB drive, 107 00:05:03,170 --> 00:05:05,240 click Next, and then let's click Create. 108 00:05:05,240 --> 00:05:05,530 Great! 109 00:05:05,530 --> 00:05:09,790 So now we have a new virtual disk, and when we finish that wizard, 110 00:05:09,790 --> 00:05:11,890 it launches yet a third wizard. 111 00:05:11,890 --> 00:05:14,690 Now, again, the paradigm is important for you to understand. 112 00:05:14,690 --> 00:05:17,570 The pool allows you to create virtual disks, 113 00:05:17,570 --> 00:05:20,480 and the virtual disk is a stand in for a physical disk, 114 00:05:20,480 --> 00:05:23,740 and it's unusable unless you've created at least one volume. 115 00:05:23,740 --> 00:05:26,730 The volume's going to give us our file system and our drive letter. 116 00:05:26,730 --> 00:05:30,100 Although, technically, you could mount your volume to a folder, 117 00:05:30,100 --> 00:05:33,090 that's an NTFS feature that's been around for a long time, 118 00:05:33,090 --> 00:05:35,570 but I'm going to go old school and use a drive letter. 119 00:05:35,570 --> 00:05:40,550 So let's click Next, verify our server, verify our project virtual disk, 120 00:05:40,550 --> 00:05:41,300 click Next. 121 00:05:41,300 --> 00:05:42,110 What size? 122 00:05:42,110 --> 00:05:43,130 I'm going to use it all. 123 00:05:43,130 --> 00:05:43,680 Next. 124 00:05:43,680 --> 00:05:45,620 Drive letter or a folder mount. 125 00:05:45,620 --> 00:05:47,240 Nope, I'm going to do a drive letter. 126 00:05:47,240 --> 00:05:47,810 Next. 127 00:05:47,810 --> 00:05:51,060 File system can be NTFS or ReFS. 128 00:05:51,060 --> 00:05:53,320 I'm going to actually choose ReFS here. 129 00:05:53,320 --> 00:05:57,200 I will use the default allocation size, and for a new volume, 130 00:05:57,200 --> 00:06:01,140 I will call this project‑disk1, and then click Next. 131 00:06:01,140 --> 00:06:04,990 Are we going to do data deduplication to save even more disk space? 132 00:06:04,990 --> 00:06:07,420 Well, we're going to learn about this in the next module, 133 00:06:07,420 --> 00:06:08,910 so I'll leave that disabled. 134 00:06:08,910 --> 00:06:11,940 We can always enable it at a later time if we want to. 135 00:06:11,940 --> 00:06:16,320 Let's click Next and then Create to finish creating the New Volume Wizard. 136 00:06:16,320 --> 00:06:16,860 Nice. 137 00:06:16,860 --> 00:06:19,910 So at this point, we could come back to Disk Management, 138 00:06:19,910 --> 00:06:21,940 and let me do a Rescan Disks, 139 00:06:21,940 --> 00:06:26,050 and now you can see I have my project disk that's mounted at drive G. 140 00:06:26,050 --> 00:06:28,680 It is a 10‑GB ReFS volume. 141 00:06:28,680 --> 00:06:32,140 I can right‑click Open, and it's now fully usable, okay? 142 00:06:32,140 --> 00:06:35,880 Now, how does this look from the context of Windows Admin Center? 143 00:06:35,880 --> 00:06:40,600 Let me pop into my Edge browser, and I'm going to hop into localmem1, 144 00:06:40,600 --> 00:06:42,680 which is my current machine. 145 00:06:42,680 --> 00:06:43,660 Let's connect in. 146 00:06:43,660 --> 00:06:46,100 And then let's search our Tools for storage. 147 00:06:46,100 --> 00:06:48,580 And if we come down to the Storage node, 148 00:06:48,580 --> 00:06:50,680 unfortunately, at this point, 149 00:06:50,680 --> 00:06:54,010 Windows Admin Center doesn't support Storage Spaces. 150 00:06:54,010 --> 00:06:57,830 It's just basically giving us Disk Management capabilities. 151 00:06:57,830 --> 00:07:00,440 As you can see, we can enumerate our disks, 152 00:07:00,440 --> 00:07:03,560 and we can do some of the operations that we could 153 00:07:03,560 --> 00:07:05,480 through the Disk Management console, 154 00:07:05,480 --> 00:07:08,570 so we can look at our Disks view and our Volumes view, 155 00:07:08,570 --> 00:07:09,880 but that's about it. 156 00:07:09,880 --> 00:07:15,540 Actually, if I select my project‑disk, notice that we can resize the volume, 157 00:07:15,540 --> 00:07:20,280 we can edit volume properties, if you're using File Server Resource Manager, 158 00:07:20,280 --> 00:07:22,810 we can create quotas, but it looks like, 159 00:07:22,810 --> 00:07:27,100 at this point, we don't have full‑scale Storage Spaces access yet. 160 00:07:27,100 --> 00:07:28,470 That having been said, 161 00:07:28,470 --> 00:07:32,360 remember that we can always come to Settings and go to Extensions, 162 00:07:32,360 --> 00:07:34,310 and then, if we do a search, 163 00:07:34,310 --> 00:07:38,910 maybe we'll find eventually that maybe Microsoft or a third‑party contributor, 164 00:07:38,910 --> 00:07:42,760 maybe you, creates an extension that integrates with Storage Spaces. 165 00:07:42,760 --> 00:07:44,380 So, anyway, that's that. 166 00:07:44,380 --> 00:07:45,380 Let me come back here. 167 00:07:45,380 --> 00:07:49,200 Basically what you have in Windows Admin Center is that you can do 168 00:07:49,200 --> 00:07:53,590 Storage Spaces direct with Cluster Manager because clustering is a 169 00:07:53,590 --> 00:07:56,570 workload that is supported here in WAC. 170 00:07:56,570 --> 00:07:59,180 Now let me go back one more time to that server, 171 00:07:59,180 --> 00:08:01,760 localmem1, and I just want to show you, again, 172 00:08:01,760 --> 00:08:03,430 if we do a search for storage, 173 00:08:03,430 --> 00:08:06,490 we can do Storage Replica in the GUI if we don't 174 00:08:06,490 --> 00:08:08,270 want to use PowerShell to do it. 175 00:08:08,270 --> 00:08:11,260 And similar in paradigm to what I showed with the PowerShell, 176 00:08:11,260 --> 00:08:13,600 it's about creating what's called a partnership, 177 00:08:13,600 --> 00:08:16,340 and we can create our replica partner with an 178 00:08:16,340 --> 00:08:20,790 existing server or VM that's on‑prem, this is an on‑prem machine by the way, 179 00:08:20,790 --> 00:08:24,820 or we could use a new Azure VM to do a hybrid storage replica. 180 00:08:24,820 --> 00:08:25,840 That's pretty interesting. 181 00:08:25,840 --> 00:08:27,840 And then to set it up, as you can see here, 182 00:08:27,840 --> 00:08:29,960 you give your replication group a name, 183 00:08:29,960 --> 00:08:34,230 and then you specify your local volume and local log volume, 184 00:08:34,230 --> 00:08:37,420 destination server name, replication group name, 185 00:08:37,420 --> 00:08:39,750 volume and log volume, and then there will, 186 00:08:39,750 --> 00:08:42,200 at that point, be some additional options, 187 00:08:42,200 --> 00:08:45,320 what kind of replication, whether you need encryption, 188 00:08:45,320 --> 00:08:46,620 all of that kind of stuff. 189 00:08:46,620 --> 00:08:47,900 So we don't need to go further. 190 00:08:47,900 --> 00:08:54,000 I just wanted to show you this in Windows Admin Center for the sake of completeness.