Setting Disk Space Quotas on Windows Server 2012

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy and today's class is setting disk space quotas on Windows Server 2012 so disk space quotas again are one of those fabulous fabulous fabulous things that you can do in the windows world very easy that will make your life just so much simpler as an administrator so when you go out there into the real world into the enterprise world one of the things that you are going to find is that in the enterprise world most people do not need nearly as much storage disk space as they do in the consumer world so when you go home at night and you're dealing with your wife you're dealing with your kids you're dealing with your own computers you may think you may need 500 gig hard drive a terabyte hard drive a 4 terabyte hard drive because you have so much stuff to store right you've got videos you've got music you've got massive pictures you've got video games the whole nine yards well when you go into the enterprise world it's very easy to think that in the enterprise world that users employees need the same amount of storage space is very easy to think oh my golly I've got a thousand users and they're all going to need five terabytes of storage on the server well in reality in reality employees end-users don't need nearly that much space in reality many employees probably most employees only need about two to three gigs of storage space in the work environment the reason being is because when you're at work you really most of us shouldn't be downloading videos we shouldn't have huge picture files we shouldn't have our entire iTunes library on our computers basically when we are dealing with our work computers we should have Word documents and spreadsheets and powerpoint and that's about it right you don't need that much storage space well sometimes because most employees don't need that much storage space administrators will become lulled into thinking none of their users will use very much storage space the administrator will create a shared folder on a server allow users to upload as much data as they want and then all of the sudden either the server crashes or everybody runs out of storage space and they're not able to share files and folders to that shared folder on the network and the reason is is because one or two people decided to upload their entire iTunes movie collection up to that file server and it just made everything go to hell I actually had this once with a end user a CEO actually who synchronized his iPod with 500 or whatever gigs of music and videos to his laptop computer the laptop computer then actually accidentally synchronized to the server and again caused a mess so what can we do to stop this well within the Windows Server 2012 world this has been around for a while they now have quotas so you can actually say how much data users can upload or have in a folder on a network share so you can create your little shared folder on your server and then say users can have a max limit of a hundred megabytes or 100 gigabytes or five terabytes or two megabytes whatever you decide should be the quota you can very easily set that up so this is a very good tool to use in an environment where you have a lot of users because you can set up this quota system and then you don't have to worry about one little uploading their entire iTunes collection and trying to crash everything so when we set up these quotas there's a couple of very nice pieces of functionality with the quota system in Windows Server 2012 the first very nice functionality is as I was saying you can create something called a hard so a hard limit means when the user hits this much storage space they are done they get no more whatsoever that's it so the hard limit is when you hit that amount and you don't get any more well one of the other pieces of functionality you can have is something called a soft limit so the soft limit what happens is when somebody hits that limit they can continue to go past that limit but a whole bunch of alerts and notifications go off to say warning warning Will Robinson you are using up too much data so this can be very good especially when you're dealing with c-level executives now again I know I keep talking about different types of employees and how you should treat different types of employees and I'm sure there's a lot of proletariat's out there that are really pissed that I keep talking about how c-level executives should get preferential treatment over togs well in the real world c-level executives get preferential treatment over cogs you know when you have the call center employees when you have to warehouse workers when you have the administrative assistants they get a different level of respect than the c-level executives so with the cogs with with the people that basically are the low level replaceable employees you can give them the hard limits where as soon as they hit that limit they can't go over they can't do anymore basically that's the only amount of storage they get well when you're dealing with a c-level executives you don't want to do that because you is a little geek you don't want to be telling the boss what the boss is gonna be doing because that's going to turn into all kinds of nastiness so with the bosses what you can do is you can do these things called soft limits where when they hit the limit all kinds of alarms and buzzers and alerts go off but they're still allowed to put more data on there why because they're the bosses so that is one of the useful functionality so you can send off all the alerts so as soon as a c-level executive hits out limit what you can do is you can go to them and you can say hey look you got the alert I got the alert you're using more than your quota that's fine now will you what now that can hat what can happen is either you as a c-level executive can delete some of your stuff or you as a c-level executive can give me a bigger budget so I can go out and buy more storage space so you as a c-level executive you make the decision either of those decisions is fine by me but you allow them to make that so that's what that soft limit allows you to do not only that but before you hit the soft limit or the hard limit you can hit um thresholds notification thresholds to say when alerts should be sent off so if somebody is using 80% of their limit should an email be sent off to an administrator or should an email be sent off to the user to say hey just so you know you are using 80% of your limit you may be you may want to think about deleting files or folders right now so these are some that parts of the functionality that are very very very useful for the quota system again this is stupid little tools that I know as a new person you may not think are that impress over that cool but remember when you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of users a simple little quota system is just completely and utterly the bee's knees now we're gonna go to the computer I'm going to show you how to set this up because it's very easy it's very very very easy to configure now one of the warnings that I will give you though is the tool that we are going to be using called the file server Resource Manager MMC is not installed by default on Windows Server 2012 you have to go in to the add roles and features and actually add that functional functionality yet so if you go to tools and you don't see this MMC snap-in remember you have to add in the functions and features and when you do then it will actually show up so let's go over to computer now so I can show you oops so I can show you how this works because it is is it's just a really really wonderful little tool so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to go down to server manager so server manager again is kind of like the hub where every yes now I have already installed the file server Resource Manager but if you have not done so yet what you're going to do is from server manager you're going to click on manage here and then you're going to go to add roles and features from here you just do next next you do next this is what we're going to be looking for so what we're going to do is we're going to go down and we are going to look for the file and storage services this is what we're going to be looking for and most likely this is already checked off for you so what you need to do is you need to expand it you then need to expand file and I scuzzy services and then what you're going to be looking for is this file server resource manager so I have already installed it but you probably have not so then what you would do is you would check off this box and then you would go and you would do next next next next next next next next next so so go down drill down the file server resource manager check off the box and then hit next next xxxxX once you have done that you will be able to go up to tools and then you will have the MMC snap-in so file server resource manager so we can click on that and this brings up the control panel that we'll use for quotas so what we're going to be using today is this quota management utility so basically we just expand that and under this we have two tools so we have quotas and quota templates now again remember remember remember remember remember that in the windows world we want to be creating templates and groups as much as possible so you don't want to assign permissions or quotas or anything we want to be able to like group as many things as possible instead of creating individual quotas we want to create like a template so we can assign it to numerous people so whenever we're dealing with Windows Server we're always thinking about how can we make this as large as possible so what we can do that is instead of creating individual quotas we can create what are called quota templates and they already have a number of default quota templates so we have like one here for the 100 megabyte limit so if we right-click this and then we do edit template properties we can see what this 100 megabyte limit has so it's a hundred megabyte limit it is a hard quota so if somebody hits the hunter megabyte mark they won't be able to to put any more data into that folder we can see I talked about the notifications before at the warning at the 85% level an email will get sent out at the 95% level an email and event log will get sent out and that the hundred percent level again the email and event log so this is one of the default templates that has already been created so if we want to create our own template all we do here is we right-click and then we do create quota template so basically what we're gonna do is we're not gonna copy we're gonna give it a name so we're gonna say that our users can get a hundred gigabytes of storage space so hundred and then we're going to go to gigabytes so it's now 100 gigabytes we - 100 terabytes hundred gigabytes under kilobytes whatever you want then we're going to say is it a hard quota or a soft quota we're going to leave it at hard we don't want our users using a more than 100 gigs and then we can put in notification thresholds so we can add a notification up here is where you say the percentage so when somebody gets to this percent what happens so the default is 85% so with let's say the 85% you can have it send an email to the following administrators and you can put in the administrator email and we can say send an email to the user who exceeded the threshold again we want to keep our users in the communication loop as much as possible if we can have the system automatically tell them they're doing something wrong then that makes them mad at the system it doesn't make them mad at us so basically we're going to have this so it'll send them an email then down here it'll actually we can actually type out what we want the subject to be and we can say what we want the the message body to be so the user so source owner quota threshold bla bla bla bla bla bla bla and we can insert some other variables the other thing we can do down here is we can put in additional email headers and we can do carbon copies and blind carbon copies one of the useful tools here is again if you are having problems with users it is better that there may their management deals with them than you whenever you walk in remember everybody hates a geek well if you can have the managers the employees managers dealing with this problem it's that view that can make your life a lot easier so you can have this notification be carbon copied to their manager so that the management can deal with it again you get out of the loop so you can do that here you can go to event log so you can say I want a warning sent to the event blog you can actually have a command run um and we can just do a normal report so these are all the things so you can create multiple notifications so we can do an 85-percent notification then we can do a 90% notification basically whatever you want to have happen you can just keep adding all these things here so this is the template that you will have created so now what we can do is we can go over to the quotas and actually set a quota for a shared folder on the network so right in here we can do a create a quota and then we're going to say what the quota path is so what folder are we creating a quota on so we already have that shared folder from the the lesson that we did before so we have this share a folder with a private and public so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a quota on share so I can do that then what I can do is I can go down and here I can either do a custom quota property where we generally don't want to do or we can drive properties from a quota template so basically we can just go here we can go to our 100 gigabyte quota template and we can just assign that template to this share and then we hit create so now any of the folders in that share users can only store up to 100 gigabytes of data as soon as they go over those notification limits they start getting alerts so on and so forth so that's really all there is the quotas again this is a simple little tool that is going to make your life easier in the real world and this is especially one of those good little tools that you want to set up as preventive maintenance even if you're not having problems with this now you set this up in the future just so you won't have problems in the future again one CEO who synchronizes his iPod to his laptop that synchronizes to the server and it can cause all kinds of a mess imagine if you know one of the secretaries or something like that again synchronizes all kinds of data goes up onto the network and then it's just that if you set a quota where they only get about 10 gigs of storage space then they may cause a problem for themselves but they're not going to cause a problem for the entire network so this is what you can do with disk space quotas again the hard limit means once the user hits that limit they can go no further soft limit means they can go further but just a whole bunch of alarms and bells and whistles go off notifications go off and that type of thing the notification levels allow you to say that at the 80 percent limit I want an email to go to the user at the 90 percent limit I want an email to go to the user and the administrator at the 95 percent limit I want an email to go to the user the administrator and the users manager again as much as you can stay out of the middle of all that mess the better for you so that's basically the simple what there is for quotas now when you're setting the quotas now it will be set for the entire folder and will be set for all users of that folder so all all users get a maximum of whatever that quota is if you want to create different quota levels then you should create different folders and assign different quotas to those folders again this can get a little complicated because now you're starting to deal with permissions you're starting to deal with shared folders and permissions and quotas but hey you guys are starting to understand how all this stuff works now so so you should be able to figure it out again as always make sure you set up your virtual lab make sure you start playing with it because that's how you're going to learn all this stuff um now the material that I talked about today again as I keep talking telling you guys Windows Server 2012 unleashed by Sam's this is a good book this book has the information on these quotas plus a lot of additional stuff so if you're a little confused or if you want more info again go to Amazon for 30 or 40 bucks you can buy this book and will make your life a lot easier so as you know I lied the computer guy this class was setting disk space quotas on Windows Server 2012 as always I enjoyed teaching this class and look forward to see on the next one

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 122,256

Keywords: Eli, the, Computer, Guy

Id: x1ZAIK5125Y

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2013