Manage Storage Spaces and Storage Pools in Windows Server 2012

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy in today's class is managed storage spaces and storage pools in Windows Server 2012 now as they say whenever Microsoft sees a good thing they will catch up at some point so basically storage spaces and storage pools in Windows Server 2012 is a ripoff of LVM from Linux but hey even if it is a ripoff of LVM from Linux it is a very useful piece of functionality in the Windows Server world and it makes our lives as administrators a lot easier so with all the things that we've been talking about lately with all the components and Technology and computers we have been talking about how we are trying to separate out all of the different layers in a type of technology so that we can administer those layers separately so we talk about virtualization when we talk about Software Defined Networking we're talking about about separating out these different layers and managing each layer separately well that's what storage spaces and storage pools does for administering or managing data on your server so back in the day when you had data on your server essentially you had a hard drive the hard drive was formatted and had a partition and the data was all put onto that partition so for all intents of purposes that hard drive the partition and the data was all one unit they then added raid but even with raid basically you added another component to that unit but it was all one big chunk o stuff the the data and the partition and the hard drive and even the raid card was all one unit if anything failed oh oh spaghetti monster help you because everything kind of went to hell very quickly now a storage space is what we're doing is we're separating out all of the different layers so that we can manage them separately and so that we have more fault tolerance and more flexibility so now what we do is we have the physical hard drives that we add to the server what we're going to do now is we're going to turn those hard drives into what is called a storage pool so we simply we take those hard drives and put them into a pool of storage from there we can create virtual hard drives that disturber will see as if they were physical hard drives we can format those virtual hard drives and then we can add volumes to the virtual hard drive so that you can actually store data so now the hard drives the physical hard drives themselves are separated from the virtual hard drives which are then separated from the volumes so that they can all be managed separately why this makes a life a lot easier for us is it allows us to add and subtract hard drives to the system much more easily than you could before so you don't have to buy any new software you don't have to - to go out and pay $600 for some Acronis thing so now if you want to add more hard drive space to a server you can slim simply slot in a new hard drive you can add it to the pool you can extend the virtual hard drive you can extend the volume and away you go all of these things are separated on two different levels so to explain you to really show you how this works we'll go over to my server and actually demonstrate this to you so what I have now is again I have my demonstration machine that we've been using for a long time now so it's Windows 8 and then I have VirtualBox installed on Windows 8 and then within VirtualBox I have a Windows 2012 file server so what I have done is I've added four virtual hard drives to that virtual file server so that's what's going on here now if you have a real server so if you have it you have a real piece of metal server in front of you instead of having these virtual hard drives like we do in VirtualBox you would actually add physical hard drives to the server but let's go over the computer so I can show you a basically how this works because this is just really really really cool so again I say we're looking at VirtualBox right now and this is the file server I'm using for the demonstration if I right-click and I go to settings I just want to show you if we go to storage so this is the system drive this is where the operating system is installed but that I've added disk one does to disk three disc four as basically these are the equivalent of physical hard drives that I've added to the system to make this work so we're going to open up the file server so now we're at the the windows 2012 file server and what we need to do is we need to open up server manager so server manager is what we are going to be working in to do all of our work or most of our work today so what we'll do is we'll go up and we'll go over to file and storage services and then once we get here we'll go down to storage pools so the process is is we take the hard drives we turn them into a storage pool once there's a storage pool we create a virtual hard drive in the storage from the from the storage pool and then once we have done that we have create a volume on the virtual hard drive so when we come in here for the storage pools there's going to be this primordial I don't really understand the point of the primordial it's just kind of here so so don't really worry about it what we want to do is what we're going to do is we're going to right click and we're going to do new storage pool so you look down at the bottom here you can see physical disks and you can see these four physical disks that have been added to the machine so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to right click I'm going to do do storage pull you do next give the pool a name because Windows 2012 really likes names we do next and then we say what hard drives we want to add to the pool so we'll do just three right now because I want to show you how you can add hard drives to the pool later now over here for allocation there's automatic or hot spare for this class since I try to keep things simple for you guys if you just leave it with automatic if you want to do your own self studying and figure out about hot spare and all that by all means do it but right now I would suggest you just leave it automatic that makes basically what this means is that the the Windows server will auto magically you manage all of this stuff and you don't have to worry about it so then from there we're going to click Next so it's going to turn those three hard drives so it physical disks 1 2 & 3 it's going to turn that into a pool and then we're going to create so now that we have created that pool we can see that it's sitting here as a pool so if we click on it the pool we can see that there's physical disks here these three physical disks are in the pool but then under virtual disks we can see that there's no virtual disks here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to create a virtual disc we're going to start the wizard so now we're going to do next it's going to ask what pool do we want to create the disk from so just the pool we have again with server you know this is marked as much an art as a science so you could have five pools or ten pools on here if you had 20 hard drives connected to the system you could create I don't know you create ten different pools if you really wanted to but we just have one so then we'll click Next again it's always asking for the name the isk we're going to say or gonna do next and then what it's going to ask here is what kind of fault tolerance do we have again remember how I was saying we're separating the heart the the hardware from the fault tolerance from the hard drives from all that stuff so the fault tolerance is not on the hard drive lab layer as it was before but now it's when we actually create this virtual disk so this is a lot like raid here it's kind of like Microsoft's version of raid so we have simple what this means is data will be striped across all the physical disks in the pool with no fault tolerance of a single disk in the pool fails all your data is gone so I would suggest not doing that we have mirror what mirror means is data is duplicated on two or three physical disks increasing the reliability so what this means is that your data is actually copied to multiple discs so if one or two fail you don't lose all of your data so you'll see here you need at least five disks to protect you from two simultaneous disk failures then there's parody which is basically like the old-fashioned raid5 disk striping with parity it strikes across all the disks and then uses one for fault tolerance so one can fail and everything stays up and running I would suggest you go with mirroring but again art and science at the end of the day you decide what is best and then we're going to do next then it's going to say provisioning type thin or fixed so fixed is like creating an old-fashioned partition where you say you want the hardware the the partition to be 75 gigs and it uses all of those 75 gigs immediately for the partition what thin does is it only actually uses the space as it needs it so you say that you want the partition to be 75 gigs in size it will start with a small partition as it can and then it will automatically increase the partition size as the as that the drive it's as your your needs enlarge so I would say stay within then is very good for like when you start if you have to do data recovery in the future I would say just do thin from here it will ask you what what size do you want this this hard drive to be so I would just say 72 gigs and then I do next and gives you all the information and then it creates and then we do close so now we have created this virtual disk so we have the physical disks that have been turned into the pool and then then from the pool we have created the virtual disk now one of the things I want to show you then is we go over to computer management and we go over to disk management when you get this just cancel don't do anything I want to show you that now only two hard drives are seen by the system or two of the new hard drive so we have the system drive like we had before we have disk for this is the one I left out of the pool and then now this is the new virtual hard drive that we created so understand that the sir itself sees that virtual hard drive as an actual hard drive and you will also see that it's not formatted at this point so it's a hard drive but it actually doesn't show up anywhere so if we go to file explorer and I go to computer you can see that the hard drive doesn't show up anywhere yet so what we're going to do is we're going to minimize and we're going to right-click on the virtual disk and we're going to do new volume new volume is going to create the volume that we can actually use to store data on so what we're going to do is we're going to go to disk five so this is that virtual disk that we created with 72 gigs of capacity click Next says what do you want the volume size to be so we'll leave it as it is and what drive letter do you want it to be and it's e what file system file allocation unit just leave it as default click Next blah blah blah and now we are going to kick creat hit create so we created the pool then we created the virtual hard drive now we've created the volume now that we've created a volume we have someplace we can now store data on this server so this volume is now on the virtual hard drive that's been created out of the pool and the pool has been created out of the the hard drives that you added on to the computer so all of these different layers now what makes things really cool with Server 2012 is we have the ability to add hard drives to the pool so that we can increase the size of the virtual hard drives and then the volumes themselves one of the big problems that we have as technicians and the modern world is every time we buy any amount of storage that we think is way more storage than we would ever need Microsoft or some company comes out with some new file standard that is so much larger than anything else we have seen before I remember the days when you took a digital picture and it took up like 200 kilobytes of space hey that's no big deal right now some of these raw pictures that people are taking are like 500 Meg's like per picture so if you I this new 2012 server you create the stored spool you create the volumes and you think hey look that's like five terabytes of storage nobody's ever going to use that amount storage well guess what in two years probably all that storage is used up well what's nice with these storage spools and storage spaces is you can add a new hard drive you can increase the size of the pool after you can crease the size the pool you can increase the size of a virtual hard disk and then you can increase the size of the volume so you can keep increasing the sizes of these things so we go back to the computer again as I said before with this pool I only added three of the hard drives so now I want to add another one so I right click and I can do add physical disk so from there I can see this other physical disk that I did not add before I can select that allocation again I leave ok and now that fourth disk has been added to the storage pool so that the overall capacity is now 97 gigs so it was like 75 before so now we've increased the size so imagine with your server if you could add a new two terabyte hard drive to your server your that would make your life a lot easier now what we can do for the disk is I can simply go to the disk and I can extend the virtual disk so since I know the capacity is 97 gigs I can now make that virtual hard drive 97 gigs we do ok so now it's extending so now the capacity of that virtual hard drive is 97 gigs we can then go to the volume so this new volume here that only has like 72 gigs of space I can right click I can do extend and from here I can enlarge that also so we just leave it like 96 just so I don't have any problems here so now that easily I was able to add a hard drive to the pool extend the virtual hard drive and then extend the partition and there you go that is what makes life so wonderful with these these storage pools and sand storage spaces now the one thing you'll notice is that everything here said extend so extend volume right if we go back here or if we go back to pools and I right-click extend virtual disk or add it's always about adding now as you as you know if you've been dealing with Server 2012 or 2008 you normally have the ability not just to an extend the volume but to also shrink it if you actually want to shrink a volume oddly enough you have to go back here to computer management and when you're at computer management this is where you will be able to shrink the volume if you wanted to so this new volume e for some reason I want to shrink it this is where it gives me the ability to shrink so so again when you're using the the server manager it's all about extend extend extend bigger bigger bigger if you want to shrink you would actually come here into computer management to shrink that volume not I'm not going to do it now because you can run into a few problems when your deal dealing with that so that's basically what there is with storage spaces so this is LVM for the windows world and it's really really really really cool now this is one of those things that you need to play with when you're not dealing with real data storage spaces storage pools very robust very useful very good very resilient I would definitely use this in an enterprise environment without thinking twice about it but make sure you have a backup system for it and again make sure you know what you're doing when you're dealing with the size of the data sets we have now you know just the massive amounts of data some companies have or even some homes have if you do something wrong you could create a mess that quick and again it's not difficult to recover four terabytes of data but it's going to take you a really really really long time if you do something stupid so again the main point of storage spaces and storage pools is we're separating out all the layers of storage to store data on your server so the hard drives are their own thing then you have the pool then you have the virtual hard drive and then you have the Vall use are all different layers that are managed separately what this allows us to do since we're managing them separately is we can go in and we can play and we can do some cool things we can extend we can shrink we can do thin provisioning all of that kind of stuff the only thing in here to realize where the hard drives is again in the Windows Server world any of the windows worlds you can't play with the system hard drive so the system hard drive is a drive that has the operating system installed so you can't add the system hard drive to a storage pool or do any of that fancy stuff because Microsoft doesn't let you messing with it and just just mucking everything up so just keep that in mind so you're thinking about the number of hard drives you have on your server don't think about the system hard drive because I can see you guys going oh I my system hard drives a three terabyte hard drive so I'll use space from that no I don't care your system drive could be a twenty terabyte hard drive but you simply can't use it for these pools so that's just something to keep in mind there but again this is just a wonderful thing go play with it because Academy it's just it shouldn't I mean for storing data it just makes life a lot easier especially again nowadays as we start saving more and more and more and more and more data being able to simply put a new hard drive into your server extend that pool extend the virtual hard drive extend the volume and away you go again like I say with the fault tolerance and redundancy Microsoft is doing all that stuff Auto magically so you don't have to worry about breaking mirrors or breaking the the array or any of that kind of stuff you don't really have to worry about doing anything too awfully stupid afraid again in the real world one of the biggest problems I've seen with raid is new technicians doing something really stupid with raid configuration and then just losing all of that so the nice part with this is all kind of just done auto magically in the background this does not mean you don't need a backup system again I do trust this I do believe this is robust I would use this at an enterprise world and you bet your your bongos I would also have a backup system just in case anything happen again be very very careful with this because either restore and started storing more and more data it's very easy to kind of like forget or not think about a backup system or kind of like put the backup system into a back burner and say I'll figure out about it later but if you've got five terabytes or if you've got ten terabytes in some kind of storage unit and something goes wrong and you don't have a backup system that could be very nasty so this does have fault tolerance this does have redundancy but you still need a backup system so as you know on Eli the computer guy today's class was managed storage spaces and storage pools in Windows Server 2012 again I gave you an overview of how this works there is more to it so again go in play with it do some Google searches but this is basically the overview you can go in you can do what I showed you today and just make your life a lot easier so so as always I enjoy teaching this class and I look forward to seeing the next one

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 150,413

Keywords: Eli, the, Computer, Guy

Id: oF1VoIftDMs

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2013