Hello, Claus here again. This time we’ll take a look at the work done around simplifying the deployment of Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).
If you have been following along, you know that once you form a cluster you would 1) enable S2D, 2) create a storage pool, 3) define storage tiers, and 4) create volumes for your virtual machines or file shares. In Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5, enabling S2D will automatically create the storage pool and define the storage tiers for you.
In addition, we have enhanced our ability to detect the storage available, and now automatically configure cache in more storage configurations, including:
- SATA SSD + SATA HDD
- NVMe SSD + SATA HDD
- NVMe SSD + SATA SSD (all-flash)
- NVMe SSD + SATA SSD + SATA HDD (3 tiers of storage)
Let’s take a look.
I have four servers running Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 with the Failover Clustering feature installed. The first step is to form the cluster:
New-Cluster -Name S2D-CLU -Node "43B20-38", "43B20-36", "43B20-34", "43B20-32" -NoStorage
The next step is to enable Storage Spaces Direct:
Enable-ClusterS2D
Once the command completes, you can examine the results. First, let’s look at the automatically created storage pool:
Get-StoragePool S2D* | FT FriendlyName, FaultDomainAwarenessDefault, OperationalStatus, HealthStatus -autosize FriendlyName FaultDomainAwarenessDefault OperationalStatus HealthStatus ------------ --------------------------- ----------------- ------------ S2D on S2D-CLU StorageScaleUnit OK Healthy
The pool naming logic is [S2D on <ClusterName>]. In this particular deployment, the pool name becomes “S2D on S2D-CLU”. Let’s also take a look at the automatically-created storage tiers:
Get-StorageTier | FT FriendlyName, ResiliencySettingName, MediaType, PhysicalDiskRedundancy -autosize FriendlyName ResiliencySettingName MediaType PhysicalDiskRedundancy ------------ --------------------- --------- ---------------------- Capacity Parity HDD 2 Performance Mirror SSD 2
Storage Spaces Direct automatically created two storage tiers: a mirror tier and a capacity tier. The storage tier details depend on the storage devices in the system, and thus vary from system to system. All you have to do now is create the volumes you need for your virtual machines or file shares. With the two storage tiers automatically created by Storage Spaces Direct, you can create a) mirror volumes, b) parity volumes and c) multi-resilient volumes. Let’s create a multi-resilient volume:
New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName S2D* -FriendlyName MRV -FileSystem CSVFS_REFS -StorageTierFriendlyName Performance, Capacity -StorageTierSizes 100GB, 900GB
I am excited about the work we have done to simplify deploying Storage Spaces Direct. It is now merely 1) enable Storage Spaces Direct, and 2) start creating volumes for your virtual machines or file shares. Let me know what you think.
– Claus Joergensen