Adding Hard Drives and Creating Volumes in Windows Server 2012

hello again as you know I'm Eli the computer guy and today's class is adding hard drives and creating volumes and Windows Server 2012 so whenever you're dealing with servers you're most likely going to have to be able to add hard drives to those servers and be able to create volumes so that you can store data for the client computers on the network so with most client computers you know if you're dealing with Windows 7 or Windows 8 or Windows XP generally you put in the one hard drive you install the operating system you install the software and your my Doc's and whatever just sit there on that one single hard drive it's pretty simple pretty easy no big deal you can do some pretty cool configurations with these client operating systems hard drives but at the end of the day nobody really ever does because hey it's a Windows 7 desktop computer you probably don't care enough well once you start dealing with servers remember servers are storing data for the entire network so now you are not storing data for a single user you may be storing data for a hundred users a thousand users hopefully not ten thousand users or more but but you could you may have to be able to store lots and lots of data for different users and so you will have to be able to install additional hard drives and then configure them so that they can store all of that data so with many servers you know when I had my computer repair shop a couple of years ago we had one server with 12 one terabyte hard drives that's not a lot by today's standards but it was three years ago so so having a server that had 12 terabytes of storage what was a big deal but nowadays you are going to run into the same issue where you may be using two terabyte hard drives or three terabyte hard drives but you're going to have to add those hard drives to the server to make that server be able to store all of the data that you need to store one of the nice things that they have with the servers nowadays and with Windows Server 2012 is that we have a lot more flexibility with our hard drives so that we can swap hard drives in a live system and we don't have to do migrations like we used to so long time ago in a galaxy far far away five years ago six years ago if you created a partition on a server in order to store data if you needed to add additional hard drives to that partition so let's say you created a four terabyte partition which six years ago seems like an amazing amount of storage space but then that all filled up and you wanted to add an additional terabyte to that partition it was very difficult to do you would most likely have to pull the data off basically recreate that partition create an entirely new partition and then put the data back on again or you may have to go out and use some expensive third party software well now with Windows Server 2012 with what is built into it with functionality that's built into it you can now expand and shrink volumes basically on command you just hit shrink and it'll shrink if you would expand it'll hit expand so now instead of having to go through a horrible tedious nasty routine in order to add hard drive space to your server you can literally put in a new hard drive you can extend the current partition the current volume onto that hard drive and then you can go home and you can get sleep and you can be with your corgis or your wife or whatever else it makes life a lot easier now the big thing when you are going to be dealing with server hard drives and volumes and data is to make sure that you are very very very very very very careful remember you know when you're dealing with your desktop computer even if you do something catastrophic Lee stupid you can probably fix it right if you're dealing with your desktop computer and you do something really colossal II just dumb the fact is if you put enough time and energy into it you can most likely fix your screw up when you're dealing with servers that's not necessarily so if you make a very very small mistake with your volumes or drives or any of that you can you can just devastate all of that data and make it an ear you just simply cannot repair it so the one thing is whenever you're dealing with with drives volumes partitions so on and so forth on a services always be very careful always make sure you know what you're doing and the big thing in a production environment is make sure you always have a recent backup the most recent backup possible on hand so if you totally trash all the data you're only making your life miserable for a day or so you're you're not you're not losing all of that data for a company you really really really do have to be careful about this I've seen this in the real world one of the problems when you have a PC repair technicians that start to go into the server world or they figure hey you know a Windows 8 computer I know how to fix that so you can probably fix the windows server 2012 box well one of the places they get into major troubles as they start messing with the partitions the volume so on and so forth and they they just make a hash of everything so be careful as I'm showing you here in my little lab environment what I would suggest for you guys is that make sure to create your own little lab make sure that you're playing with Windows Server 2012 and from in your lab add drives create volumes play around with it in the lab environment so you get used to it so that when you go out in the real world it's not a shock tube again the big problem with hard drives and volumes and all that is is a single click or two or three clicks and you can cause an incredible amount of damage just that quick so the system that I'm going to be showing you today again I'm using the same virtual setup that I've been using for all the classes in this track so I've got Windows 8 for toolbox on that and then all of my instances so I'm going to show you how to add virtual hard drives to this virtual server that I've created within VirtualBox now if you are dealing with a physical server life is actually easier for you because all you would do instead of creating these virtual hard drives you would just take a physical hard drive you would put it into the physical server and then you would go on from there the one warning that I will give you if you are dealing with servers in the real world is many times they disable hard drive controllers that are not currently being used so if you put in a new hard drive you boot up Windows Server 2012 and it does not detect the hard drive what that means is the hard drive has been disabled in BIOS so you need to shut the server down what reboot it go into the BIOS setup utility and then figure out how to turn on the hard drive controller from there so that that's the warning I will give you so with that let's go over the computer now because a lot of this is just going to be demonstrations so it might as well actually just start showing you how all this stuff works so here we are this is my this is my Windows 8 computer with VirtualBox installed on it and over here these are all the instances of the operating systems that I play with to show you demonstrations now we're going to go down here and this is the new file server that I created in the last class and we are going to be playing with this more and more so this is simply a Windows Server 2012 server that's been added to the Active Directory domain of eat ECG but basically this is just you just just a just a plain old simple server the one thing that I want you to notice especially if you're dealing with a virtual environment is where it says here powered off so we are going to go into settings now and add these virtual hard drive make sure you have properly shut down the the 2012 server before you start doing this this is not me put it in the hibernate this is not me put in the standby make sure you have shut down the server properly so that you'll be able to add the our drives and they will be detected properly when you turn the can be a server on so from here what we're going to do is we're going to right click and then we're going to go up to settings so this will give us the settings for this particular server now what we're going to do is we're going to go down to storage and this gives us the the storage configurations for this particular virtual server the first of course is the IDE controller and this controls the optical drives or as we can see there's an ISO file in there now so we are not going to mess with this what we want to go down to is we are going to go down to the SATA controller the virtual SATA controller and we can see that there's one virtual hard drive there already so this is the system disk this is the the drive that we created in order to install the server operating system but what we want to do is we want to add a number of new virtual drive so we need to highlight the controller make sure you highlight the controller then all the way over here this whole platter thingy what we're going to do is we're going to hit the plus that so this is going to add a hard disk so it's going to add a virtual hard disk it's going to ask what do we want to do you want to choose an existing hard disk or you want to create a new one so for this what we're going to do is we're going to create a new one we do new just leave it at VDI next leave it at dynamic next I would say leave it at 25 gigs and then I'm just going to call this this one and then hit create and then what we're going to do is I'm just going to keep doing this just so I can create four disks so I can show you guys how this works just to just three and disc 4 so depending on what configurations you want to do you may want to change these sizes you may want to do a whole bunch of stuff but again simply for this demonstration today all I cared about was just creating a four new hard drive so these are the equivalent one you guys understand these are the equivalent of four new physical hardest not partitions not volumes these are physical hard drives as far as this server is concerned and then we're going to say ok and then I'm going to double click on the file server to boot it up so now as it boots up it will detect those hard drives as new hard drives into the system get just like if you slotted new physical hard drives into a physical server ah so now we wait for Windows Server 2012 to boot up that's booting well it's doing this it's going through its little routine so it will detect new hardware and all that now what we're going to do is we're just going to do control-alt-delete to log in and now we get to the normal Windows Server 2012 now you'll notice here that we're not getting any new alerts we're not being told any new hardware has been installed or any of that one of the things I want to show you is when you add these new hard drives to a server if we go down to file explorer I want you to understand that the volumes don't exist yet so if we look at computer we're going to see that the C Drive exists and we can see that that optical that fake optical drive exists but even though we installed four new hard drives they're not here well the reason they're not here is because they are not volumes yet they have not been added to the system so although it's like they're here the server knows that the the drives are connected to the server but they haven't been created as volumes haven't been turned into volumes so they're not showing up here in the file explorer so what we're going to do is you're going to exit out of this and we're going go to server manager again server manager is the main hub for we redo almost all the administration's for a server we are going to go up to tools and then we're going to go to computer management so if you've been using Windows operating systems for a while and you know that computer management is like the big tool it's where what's where a lot of the really useful utilities that we use are so here at computer management then all what we're going to do is we are going to go down and under storage we are going to go to disk management so when we go to disk management it's going to look for those new hard drives that have been stalled on to the computer and now what it's going to ask is do we want to initialize these disks so disk Wanda scoot it's three disc four so basically do we want to start using those for the system now I would just leave leave these check box I mean I suppose there's a reason you might not want to initialize them but just assume that you're always going to you're almost always going to want to initialize them so you leave these as they are but then the question down here is do you want them to be a Master Boot Record MBR or ADP t GUI D partition now this is very very important the decision you make here I would say you should always go with GPT partition table now the reason for this is that VPT can deal with volumes above two terabytes in size so if you're going to create a volume above two terabytes in size I would suggest you go with a GPT partition table MBR does not support partitions above two terabytes in size so that can be a big problem in the in the in the modern world actually it's not partitions of volumes above two terabytes in size can't deal with volumes above terabytes in size so if you format or if you initialize these disks and there let's say they're they're ten terabytes in size if you initialize them in as MBR MBR will only recognize two terabytes worth now the reason you might want to go with MBR is because GPT is not recognized by any other Windows operating system before Windows Server 2012 went server 2003 server 2008 server 2000 will not understand a GPT partition table but that doesn't really matter because these drives will be shared over the network generally and so if you have a 2003 server that Maps a drive to this 2012 server none of this here is actually going to matter that's not part of that process so I would just say just go with GPT unless you have a reason not to especially with these modern hard drives so initialize them as GPT so here we're going to do is we're going to do okay so now we can go and we can look and look at that so we have four new hard drives on the computer now even though we've initialized them though if we go back to File Explorer we're going to see there's nothing here because we still have not created any volumes so what we can do is if we want to create a volume on we're going to click in this open space here on any of these disks and we can right click and from here we can get the option for different types of volumes that we want to create so a new simple volume basically means the old fashioned partition so if you want just a simple partition on this hard drive you would create a new simple volume span volume of spamed volume is the type of volume I actually prefer for Windows 2012 environments this is a really cool type of volume what this means it's you can span the volume across numerous different hard drives so as I show you here if we have four hard drives on this system we can span our volume across all four of those so basically the server will be writing data on the first one when it gets to the end of the first hard drive it will automatically just start writing both the data on the second hard drive so I'll get to the end and then go to the third and then goes to the fourth so basically though the the server sees all of those hard drives is one single big hard drive so writes beginning to end on the first beginning another second beginning it in another third beginning to end on the fourth that is actually the one I prefer because again as we go down we can see that we have the options for raid so we have striped volume mirrored volume or raid5 volume these are the normal raid you know striped mirrored raid 5 again I just don't like rate having done play with this stuff in the real world I really really really dislike raid I would much prefer having a good backup system to be honest with you one warning that I will give you is if you are in a virtual environment please do not actually try to do raid so if you're dealing with a physical server right now you have Windows Server 2012 installed on a physical box by all means if you like raid by all means you can set up rate if you are in a virtual machine I played with this but before the class today and you try to set up raid on virtual hard drives basically everything is gonna go to hell really really quick kind of just crashes everything and it gets nasty I guess simply because it's virtual hard drives like why are you doing ray in a virtual hard drive stepa thing so if you're in a virtual environment I would just say don't play with the raid because at least in my experience it will crash if you're dealing with a physical server play with raid all of you won so then what I'm going to do then is I will right-click and I'm going to create a new span volume again span vol spanned volume is what I prefer so all we're going to do is we're going to go through a little routine here so it's going to say what disks do you want to add to the span volume so we have disk one already added so we'll add this to just 3 and disk 4 so these are all all these disks are approximately 25 gigs in size that we're going to do click next then it's going to ask what drive letter do we want to give so we can give whatever drive level letter we want so K and click next how do we want to format so basically we can give it a volume name here the big thing is that I would suggest you do do to perform a quick format doing perform a quick format will make your life a lot easier because it'll be--it'll format these drives much quicker if you have large hard drives again 1 terabyte 2 terabyte 3 terabyte hard drives and you do a full format that is going to take absolutely forever I would suggest you do a quick format you do have the option for file system we're not going to go in that that today we might do that at a different advanced class I would suggest you leave it at NTFS and then for the enable file and folder compression I would leave that unchecked but again that's one of those things as you learn more about servers you can decide whether or not you want to do and then what we're going to do is we're going to click Next and then finish now what you're going to see is for these drives in order to do this it's going to say that it needs to convert the hard drives that you created from basic disks to dynamic discs so what you need to understand about basic disks and dynamic disks our basic disks were the old way for the operating system to deal with hard drives on the computer so basically you could create 4 partitions and that was about all you can do so a basic disk is a basic basic basic basic basic disk all you can do essentially with that hard drive is you can create 4 partitions that's it you can't do a raid you can't do spam volumes you can't do you can't shrink you can't extend you can't do anything fun and nice and me you just create more partitions they came out with dynamic disks actually back in Windows Server 2000 so this has been around for a long time with dynamic disks if you convert a disk to a dynamic disk you now get a whole bunch more functionality you can use those dynamic disks for span volumes rade you can extend dynamic discs you can shrink dynamic this you can do a lot of fancy nifty stuff with them at this point in time I guess play in the past there was a reason to leave disks as basic discs instead of making them dynamic now in 2013 I don't know maybe one of you guys knows that there's a downside between a dynamic disc and a basic disk but I would suggest just always convert to dynamic it will it will be good for you so all we're going to do then is click yes and now it's going to go through and it's going to create the volume using these four drives so disc one disk to disk three and disc four we can see our now volume K and they're healthy and you can see disc one volume K this to volume K disc three disc four they are all volume K now if we go down to file explorer we can see volume K right this is the new drive so it now shows up and we can also see it's a spanned volume so now we see that we have ninety nine point three gigs in that particular span Drive so it was 425 gig hard drives combined together to create one one one big big hard drive now that's really all there is to creating a new volume now what I like with with with Windows Server 2012 is you also get the ability to either shrink or extend these volumes so I can even go to the C volume if I right-click from here it gives me the ability to shrink that volume so I actually already turned the disk 0 the system disk into a dynamic disc I had simply right clicked it before and there was an option to turn it into a dynamic disc and now I can go and I can shrink the system volume so I can shrink it so all that will happen is I right-click I do shrink and it as enter the amount of space you want to shrink by so I will say let's say 17 almost 18 gigs there and then I hit shrink and it's going to go through and it will actually shrink that volume that quickly this is nice this is the system volume I was able to do that and then now I have this unallocated space so I can turn this into a new simple volume or whatever I wanted to do with it if I want to extend I can just right click I can do extend I can do next I can do next I can do finish and now it's been extended so I can shrink the volume or I can make it larger why this becomes really important in the server environment is this is nice just for the C Drive just for the system Drive if your system admin it is just really really nice to be able to futz around with the C Drive if you need to but why this can be really important in the server world is again imagine that you have a physical server and it only has so many bays for hard drives so right now you put in that's it let's say you have five Bay's and you put in five one terabyte hard drives now all that space gets taken up and so the question is is what can you do in order to add hard drives well the cool part is is you can use this shrink and extend so you can actually shrink a volume let's say I want to shrink this by 40 so I'll shrink it and when I shrink it you'll notice that one of the hard drives is now no longer used at all so this is let's say that the hard drive that's too small so I could literally then pull this hard drive out of the system I could take a new much larger hard drive slot it into the system I then right-click on that volume I want to extend I do extend volume next I would then add that new hard drive and now it will get extended so this is one of the really really nice nifty new features these as your server needs more and more hard drive space you can use extend and shrink to very slowly be able to swap out new hard drives to make your life easier so this is the the basic things that you have to understand in order to start playing with hard drives and volumes in the Windows Server 2012 environment again there's more stuff that you can play with as always you can get much more complicated but this is the basic concepts so you're going to add your hard drives to the server when you add them they're not going to be you're not going to actually be able to use them yet if you want a server manager tools computer management disk management and that is where you'll be able to initialize them and create the different volumes again remember I would say to use that GPT partitioning when you're going to be dealing with these hard drives because that understands volumes larger than 2 terabytes the size again if you use MBR Master Boot Record that's the old version and it can only detect up to two terabytes of storage space so if you use that you're just going to run into all kinds of problems I showed you how to create the volumes I show you how to shrink the volumes again there's basic disks and dynamic disks again basic disks are the old types of disks the old types of way of dealing with hard drives where you can create four partitions and that's it that's all you can do dynamic disks allows you to do spanning allows you to do raid allows you to extend allows you to shrink allows you to do all of those those fancy neat features again my personal Elie advice is I like using spanned volumes on servers I don't like using right ok it's just me I don't know I'm a raid hater I think you should have a really really good backup system and if span drives are not enough we're going to show you how to do replication and stuff over multiple servers I would prefer to do something like that doing raid raids it's a little weird Metz the one thing that I will tell you especially for the newbies here as far as raid is concerned is if you do decide to use raid on your Windows Server 2012 server remember you're only going to be able to use raid on those data drives you can't use raid on the system drive it's an important thing to remember that a lot of people don't realize so the system Drive you cannot use raid on you can't use raid because it is software raid right so what that means is that if your operating system crashes or that one C Drive fails everything else still fails everything else you still can't get to it it's only for the data drives if you want to use raid and also to protect your operating system your system volume then you need to use hardware RAID and you need to go out and you need to buy an expensive hardware RAID controller and deal with all that mess so it's just just one of those things to keep in mind and again also with raid the big warning that it will give you if you're dealing with a VirtualBox environment don't try to do rape it crashes everything and just just just makes a hash of everything so if you want to play with raid make sure you're not doing it in a virtual environment make sure you do it with an actual physical server and if you do that in station you should be pretty good so this class was adding hard drives and creating volumes in Windows Server 2012 as you know I'm Eli the computer guy I enjoy teaching this class I look forward to seeing the next one

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 161,102

Keywords: Eli, the, Computer, Guy

Id: s4E6WcZKxRc

Length: 30min 12sec (1812 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2013