Storage Spaces
Overview
Note:
Storage Spaces is not the best solution, Windows Server is not designed to do this. You should consider other storage solutions such as RAID and Storage Area Network (SAN). It results in more reliable, efficient performance unless there is no alternative.
Storage Spaces is similar to RAID, implemented in software, it can group multiple drives into a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create a volume.
Prerequisites
General requirements
- The account used for operation must be a membership of local Administrators group or equivalent on the server.
Disks requirements
- All disks must be connected to the server through SATA, SAS, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel (FC).
- Do not create volumes on disks and keep them blank.
Resiliency requirements
- For Mirror storage layout, at least two physical disks are required.
- For Parity storage layout, at least three physical disks are required.
Other requirements
- For Tiered Storage, at least one SSD and one HDD are required.
Prepare disks
Initialize disks
Open the Server Manager and click File and Storage Services on the left pane.
You need to figure out which disks are used for Storage Spaces and are not initialized.
Click Disks on the left pane. Select and right-click these disks, and select initialize.
Set MediaType (Optional)
By default, Windows automatically detects the attached disk type and identifies it as an SSD or HDD. You can run the following command to verify it.
Get-PhysicalDisk | FT DeviceID, BusType, MediaType, Size, UniqueId
In this case, The MediaType of one of the disks is set as "Unspecified".
It is important to identify the disk correctly and set the MediaType, otherwise it will greatly slow down the performance.
If MediaType is set as Unspecified, run the following cmdlet to set an appropriate type.
Set-PhysicalDisk -UniqueId "<UniqueId>" -MediaType <SSD|HDD>
For example:
Set-PhysicalDisk -UniqueId "5000C2793BD9B9ED" -MediaType HDD
Create a storage pool
Note:
By default, all available disks are included in a pool that is named Primordial.
If no primordial pool is listed under STORAGE POOLS pane, this situation indicates that the disks don't meet the requirements for Storage Spaces.
Refer to Prerequisites for more information.
Back to the Server Manager and click Storage Pools on the left pane.
On the Physical Disks pane, right-click any disk and select New Storage Pool....
On the Before You Begin screen, click Next.
On the Storage Pool Name screen, enter a friendly name for this pool.
Click Next to proceed.
Select the disks you want to include in the storage pool.
If you want to designate one or more disks as hot spares, select Hot Spare from the drop-down box under Allocation column.
Click Next to proceed.
Review the summary and click Create.
Click Close to finish the creation.
Note:
You can add disks anytime by right-clicking the desired storage pool and selecting Add Physical Disk....
If needed, add additional disks to the pool.
Create a virtual disk
Go to the Storage Pools tab in the Server Manager.
Right-click the storage pool and select New Virtual Disk....
Select the target pool and click OK to start the wizard.
On the Before You Begin screen, click Next.
On the Virtual Disk Name screen, enter a friendly name for this virtual disk.
If you plan to configure a tiered volume, select Create storage tiers on this virtual disk.
On the Enclosure Awareness screen, click Next.
Note:
For tiered volume, you CANNOT select Parity.
Select a storage layout for this virtual disk.
For the external storage device that connects using iSCSI, select Simple.
Note:
This step won't appear if you selected Simple in the previous step, or the number of HDDs or SSDs in the storage pool is less than 2.
- Two-way mirror
- Similar to RAID 1.
- Three-way mirror
- Similar to RAID 5.
Note:
You can only select Fixed if you are configuring tiered volume.
- Thin
- Space is allocated on an as-needed basis.
- Fixed
- Allocate space immediately when creating a virtual disk.
Note:
This page varies depending on the options selected previously.
- For thin provisioning, enter a virtual disk size and select a unit (MB, GB, or TB).
- For fixed provisioning, specify a size or select Maximum size to use the maximum capacity of the storage pool.
- For tiered storage, specify the Faster (SSD) and Standard (HDD) tier sizes.
Review the summary and click Create to begin the creation.
Click Close to finish the creation.
Create a volume
Go to the Storage Pools tab in the Server Manager.
On the VIRTUAL DISKS pane, select a disk and click New Volume....
On the Before You Begin screen, click Next.
On the Select the server and disk screen, select a server and a disk and click Next.
Note:
If the virtual disk uses storage tiers, the volume will be the same size as the virtual disk and cannot be changed.
Enter a size and specify a unit (MB, GB, or TB) for this volume.
Assign a drive letter for this volume.
- File system
- Select NTFS or ReFS.
- Allocation unit size
- Do not change this unless you are sure what you are doing.
- Volume label
- Enter a friendly name to identify this volume easily.
Note:
This page appears if you selected NTFS.
Data Deduplication optimizes free space on a volume by examining the data on the volume by looking for duplicated portions on the volume, it can help reduce the impact of redundant data on storage costs.
Enable it if needed, or click Next.
Review the summary and click Create to begin the creation.
Click Close to finish the creation.
