Storage Spaces

Storage Spaces

New Feature that provides flexibility of SAN by using inexpensive attached disks.

How to Manage Storage Pools
Create the storage pool, then create LUN's from the Pool--these are virtual disks
Virtual Disk can span multiple physical disks
Requirements:
Server 2012
One Physical Drive Min
Two for resilient Mirror
Three for parity
Drives unformatted and unpartitioned
At least 10 GB
Attached internally or externally
Following Bus Supported
  Sata--Not possible in failover cluster
  SCSI--Not supported in failover cluster
  Serial Attached Scsi (SAS)
  USB--External for local storage only
Role under File and iSCSI services
  Install-WindowsFeature -Name FS-FileServer
Primordial Pool=Locally Available Disks
Each disk added
     Automatic:  Default setting--capacity on drive is set automatically
     Hot Spare:  Act as reserves not available for provisioning.  Brought online in case of failure
After creation, use Server Manager to provision new VM's.

Options are Simple Volume, Mirror,and parity
Thin provision allows storage to be unallocated until datasets require storage
Disk grows as needed
Fixed allocates space when created

Requirements

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Storage Spaces has the following requirements:

• Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, or Windows 8
• Serial ATA (SATA) or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) connected disks, optionally in a just-a-bunch-of-disks (JBOD) enclosure
  
  RAID adapters, if used, must have all RAID functionality disabled and must not obscure any attached devices, including enclosure services provided by an attached JBOD.
  
  

  Note

  Consumers can use USB drives with Storage Spaces, though USB 3 drives are recommended to ensure a high level of performance. USB 2 drives will decrease performance – a single USB 2 hard drive can saturate the bandwidth available on the shared USB bus, limiting performance when multiple drives are attached to the same USB 2 controller. When using USB 2 drives, plug them directly into different USB controllers on your computer, do not use USB hubs, and add USB 2 drives to a separate storage pool used only for storage spaces that do not require a high level of performance.
• For shared-storage deployments on failover clusters:
• Two or more servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2012
• Requirements as specified for failover clustering and Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV)
• SAS connected JBODs that comply with Windows Certification requirements
  
  For a list of certified JBODs, see the Windows Server Catalog.
• Identical SAS HBAs that are certified for use with Storage Spaces
  
  These HBAs are connected to all JBOD enclosures in the file server cluster, and can’t have built-in RAID functionality. For a list of certified HBAs, see the Windows Server Catalog.

New and changed functionality

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The following table describes some of the major changes in Storage Spaces. For more detailed information, see What's New in Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 R2.

 

Feature/functionality	New or updated?	Description
Storage tiers	New	Automatically moves frequently accessed data to faster (SSD) storage and infrequently accessed data to slower (HDD) storage.
Write-back cache	New	Buffers small random writes to SSD storage, reducing the latency of writes.
Parity space support for failover clusters	New	Enables you to create parity spaces on failover clusters.
Dual parity	New	Stores two copies of the parity information on a parity space, helping protect you from two simultaneous disk failures while optimizing for storage efficiency.
Automatically rebuild storage spaces from storage pool free space	New	Greatly decreases how long it takes to rebuild a storage space after a disk failure by using spare capacity in the pool instead of a single hot spare.