Windows Server 2012 Storage Space Part 2 ~ Tech Notes

Introduction
As on my previous article, I have explain the foundation of the storage pool and storage spaces. Now it's the time to get our hand dirty and feel it your self how easily we can built a resilience storage without any storage controller. If you haven't read my previous post on storage spaces, I would recommend you to read and try to understand how it work. You can click here

Configuration

1)In order to start with the above, you would need to plug in any physical disk (e.g. usb drive) or you can create a virtual disk and attach to the disk management. To open the disk management, you can use the command compmgmt.msc to open the administration screen. In this demo, what we will do is to create a storage pool.

2)Server manager is open by default each time when you are login in to the system. Once it is open, click on the “File and Storage Services”.

3)It will bring you to this screen, what you have seen in step 1, you have created 4 raw disk and now you can see all the disk appear when you click on storage pool.

4)Right click on the primpodial and select new storage pool.

5)It is good to have a better labeling for the pool. The reason behind is when you perform any maintenance at least you know what are those pool is been assign to.

6)You can either select 2 disk or select all the disk to create pool.

7)Verify the setting that you have committed, once you are ready click create to proceed.

8)If you did see a check box “Create a virtual disk when this wizard close”, click on it before click on the close button.

9)If you notice, the storage pool name you have been define it have been created.

10)The steps it is not end here, now you need to create the virtual disk so you can assign the disk to the host.

11)If you have a different pool name , you will see on the bottom. Since on this demo I have just one pool name, you can use the default settings and click next.

12)This is also important for the labeling purpose, you might want to create a meaningful name to it such as servername_drive1 to differentiate the disk is assign to which host.

13)Select a storage layout (choose how data will be placed on the disk):

Simple: Data is striped across disks, maximizing capacity and throughput, but decreasing reliability
Mirror: Data will be mirrored across two or three disks, improving reliability but decreasing capacity
Parity: Data will be striped with parity information across all disks, reducing capacity but improving reliability

Note: This does feel a bit like RAID, but that is only an analogy; the technology is not the same as RAID and does not use any type of RAID groupings.

14) Following layout selection, you will select a provisioning type of Thin (allocated on demand) or Fixed (allocated right now).

15)Allocate the size you required

16)Verify the content and double confirm on the configuration before create the disk.

17)Select the option “create the volume when this wizard closes”. As for now what we have achieved is we have created the pool and virtual disk. The next steps is to format the virtual disk with a file system.

18)Base on the previous configuration we have done, we have create a disk space of 20gb, now we need to format the volume.

19)You will see here, we need to specify the size again, the reason behind is we need to format the disk depending on the size we want. In this example I will use the entire allocation.