1 00:00:01,240 --> 00:00:06,340 Here we'll formally consider Storage Spaces Direct, or S2D for short. 2 00:00:06,340 --> 00:00:10,880 Storage Spaces Direct is a software‑defined storage solution that is 3 00:00:10,880 --> 00:00:14,320 meant to help businesses who may not have the resources or 4 00:00:14,320 --> 00:00:17,840 hardware‑based storage area network appliances. 5 00:00:17,840 --> 00:00:22,270 These would be storage subsystems that are network‑connected 6 00:00:22,270 --> 00:00:26,040 normally accessible via the iSCSI protocol. 7 00:00:26,040 --> 00:00:27,520 Maybe if you can afford it, 8 00:00:27,520 --> 00:00:30,930 there's the Fibre Channel hardware that gives you that shared 9 00:00:30,930 --> 00:00:34,450 storage layer that a failover cluster requires. 10 00:00:34,450 --> 00:00:34,940 But, 11 00:00:34,940 --> 00:00:38,630 Storage Spaces Direct instead allows you to combine 12 00:00:38,630 --> 00:00:43,580 between 2 and 16 Windows Server cluster nodes that will 13 00:00:43,580 --> 00:00:46,820 share their own commodity storage, that is, 14 00:00:46,820 --> 00:00:50,740 their internal and/or direct‑attached storage, 15 00:00:50,740 --> 00:00:55,020 without that need or dependency on dedicated SAN hardware. 16 00:00:55,020 --> 00:00:58,650 So is Storage Spaces Direct something every customer will want? 17 00:00:58,650 --> 00:00:59,750 No, absolutely not. 18 00:00:59,750 --> 00:01:03,350 If your business is big enough, and you're failover cluster 19 00:01:03,350 --> 00:01:06,380 needs and your needs for redundancy and speed are such that 20 00:01:06,380 --> 00:01:09,140 you can afford SAN hardware, that's totally cool. 21 00:01:09,140 --> 00:01:10,220 But at the very least, 22 00:01:10,220 --> 00:01:13,510 you need to know how to use Storage Spaces Direct for the exam. 23 00:01:13,510 --> 00:01:18,420 Because we have to remember that this is a vendor‑proprietary certification, 24 00:01:18,420 --> 00:01:22,270 and so Microsoft isn't going to ask you about third‑party OEMs, 25 00:01:22,270 --> 00:01:25,240 or original equipment manufacturers. 26 00:01:25,240 --> 00:01:28,250 Now Storage Spaces Direct is cool because it's free. 27 00:01:28,250 --> 00:01:32,090 It's with Windows Server license, so it's free with a license. 28 00:01:32,090 --> 00:01:36,220 It's also something you can do for both physical and guest failover 29 00:01:36,220 --> 00:01:39,250 clusters, now this is important. That last piece about guest 30 00:01:39,250 --> 00:01:42,950 failover clusters is important for you as a certification candidate 31 00:01:42,950 --> 00:01:44,310 because I've mentioned this before, 32 00:01:44,310 --> 00:01:47,210 you should have a test lab where you can work with 33 00:01:47,210 --> 00:01:49,200 this stuff all on your workstation. 34 00:01:49,200 --> 00:01:52,810 If you have, say, a laptop or a desktop running Windows client, 35 00:01:52,810 --> 00:01:54,590 when you have an appreciable amount of RAM, 36 00:01:54,590 --> 00:01:58,860 I would say 32 GB would be awesome, you probably could squeak by with 16, 37 00:01:58,860 --> 00:02:01,130 but I would hope as a baseline you have 32, 38 00:02:01,130 --> 00:02:04,690 and as long as your client workstation is running an appropriate 39 00:02:04,690 --> 00:02:07,450 stockkeeping unit of Windows 10 or Windows 11, 40 00:02:07,450 --> 00:02:09,800 it's basically Professional, Enterprise, 41 00:02:09,800 --> 00:02:10,330 or Education, 42 00:02:10,330 --> 00:02:15,110 you can install Hyper‑V Server on the client and download 43 00:02:15,110 --> 00:02:17,460 evaluation editions of Windows Server, 44 00:02:17,460 --> 00:02:20,220 and you can get going with failover clustering. And 45 00:02:20,220 --> 00:02:22,010 that's not exactly a guest cluster. 46 00:02:22,010 --> 00:02:23,570 A guest cluster, though, 47 00:02:23,570 --> 00:02:26,550 would be where you have a virtual machine on which 48 00:02:26,550 --> 00:02:31,220 you enable nested virtualization, and you set up the VM as a cluster node, 49 00:02:31,220 --> 00:02:33,740 which is totally fine and totally supported. 50 00:02:33,740 --> 00:02:39,240 Now, Storage Spaces Direct is intended for dual‑storage layer infrastructures, 51 00:02:39,240 --> 00:02:41,950 in other words, tiered storage. 52 00:02:41,950 --> 00:02:46,570 The best cases for Storage Spaces Direct is where each of your cluster nodes, 53 00:02:46,570 --> 00:02:52,540 your server nodes, has a mixture of solid state and lower‑speed HDD disks. 54 00:02:52,540 --> 00:02:56,500 This is great because then Storage Spaces Direct can use high‑speed 55 00:02:56,500 --> 00:03:02,270 caching with the SSD drives, and also you can prioritize data that's 56 00:03:02,270 --> 00:03:06,140 particularly volatile on that high‑speed storage. 57 00:03:06,140 --> 00:03:09,550 Microsoft doesn't officially support all HDD 58 00:03:09,550 --> 00:03:19,000 deployments in Storage Spaces Direct, even though you can physically do in all HDD SD2 deployments.