{"id":5002,"date":"2011-10-07T17:40:42","date_gmt":"2011-10-07T16:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/5002-hands-on-with-storage-spaces-in-windows-server-8.html"},"modified":"2011-10-07T17:40:42","modified_gmt":"2011-10-07T16:40:42","slug":"hands-on-with-storage-spaces-in-windows-server-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/5002-hands-on-with-storage-spaces-in-windows-server-8.html","title":{"rendered":"Hands On with Storage Spaces in Windows Server 8"},"content":{"rendered":"

Storage Spaces is a new virtual storage feature in Windows Server 8<\/a>. I have the developer preview installed, but it took me a while to get Storage Spaces working \u2013 you need one or more unused hard drives. I finally managed to find a spare 150GB Sata drive and tried it out. Note that I am going to create a 1.5TB drive on this using the magic of thin provisioning, with data deduplication thrown in for good measure.<\/p>\n

Step 1 is to go into the file services section of server manager and create a pool. A pool is a collection of one or more disks which you will use in aggregate.<\/p>\n

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Here I specify the pool name and the subsystem where it will find its disks. In my case it is the RAID controller built into the motherboard. <\/p>\n

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Success<\/p>\n

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Next task is to create a new volume. I\u2019ve selected thin provisioning as I want a drive larger than the available space. If it runs out of real space, I will have to add another drive to the pool. I have also selected Simple layout, which means no resiliency. I am doing this for the demo as I only have one drive, but in reality I would always use one of the resilient options. They are apparently not RAID, even though they are like RAID.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Next I assign the new drive to a virtual folder, as I am bored with Windows drive letters.<\/p>\n

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I turn on data deduplication. This means that I can have several copies of the same file, but it will only occupy the space of one. If a file is mostly the same as another file, I will also save space.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Success again. Note that Windows formatted the new drive for me in a matter of minutes. It may help that most of the space does not really exist.<\/p>\n

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Here is my drive ready for use, with 1,572,730,876 KB free. Handy.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I am impressed with how easy Storage Spaces are to use, and that it works with cheap Sata drives.<\/p>\n

Now, I remember that Windows Home Server had an easy to use storage system called Drive Extender<\/a>. You could just add and remove drives. Is Storage Spaces a kind of grown up version of Drive Extender? I asked the Windows storage team and got a snooty reply. \u201cWe do not contrast our upcoming capabilities with those that might have been offered in the past as part of other Microsoft products.\u201d However, the spokesperson did add:<\/p>\n

\n

Storage Spaces delivers a rich storage virtualization capability directly from within Windows. Two powerful new abstractions (Pools and Spaces) deliver multiple benefits including seamless and easy capacity aggregation and expansion ("just add drives to a pool"), optimal just-in-time allocation (via Thin Provisioning), resiliency to physical drive failures (via mirrored or parity spaces), continuous availability (via integration with failover clustering and cluster shared volumes), ease-of-management via integration with the rich new Windows Storage Management API (with WMI interfaces and associated PowerShell cmdlets), and "pay-for-play" via support for pools comprising heterogeneous media (e.g. SSDs and HDDs). Obviously, these are just a subset of features.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Obviously. I like Storage Spaces so far though, and the feature seems to bring some similar benefits to Windows Server users.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Storage Spaces is a new virtual storage feature in Windows Server 8. I have the developer preview installed, but it took me a while to get Storage Spaces working \u2013 you need one or more unused hard drives. I finally managed to find a spare 150GB Sata drive and tried it out. Note that I … Continue reading Hands On with Storage Spaces in Windows Server 8<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,97],"tags":[586,873,1002,1020],"class_list":["post-5002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microsoft","category-windows","tag-microsoft","tag-storage-spaces","tag-windows-home-server","tag-windows-server-8"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5002\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}