Storage Pool Windows Server 2022

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Mara Ermogemous

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Aug 3, 2024, 12:20:33 PM8/3/24

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This article describes how to deploy Storage Spaces on a stand-alone server. For information about how to create a clustered storage space, see Deploy a Storage Spaces cluster on Windows Server 2012 R2.

To create a storage space, you must first create one or more storage pools. A storage pool is a collection of physical disks. A storage pool enables storage aggregation, elastic capacity expansion, and delegated administration.

From a storage pool, you can create one or more virtual disks. These virtual disks are also referred to as storage spaces. A storage space appears to the Windows operating system as a regular disk from which you can create formatted volumes. When you create a virtual disk through the File and Storage Services user interface, you can configure the resiliency type (simple, mirror, or parity), the provisioning type (thin or fixed), and the size. Through Windows PowerShell, you can set other parameters such as the number of columns, the interleave value, and which physical disks in the pool to use. For information about these other parameters, see New-VirtualDisk and the Windows Server Storage forum.

From a virtual disk, you can create one or more volumes. When you create a volume, you can configure the size, drive letter or folder, file system (NTFS file system or Resilient File System (ReFS)), allocation unit size, and an optional volume label.

If you want to learn how to deploy Storage Spaces on a failover cluster, see Deploy a Storage Spaces cluster on Windows Server 2012 R2. A failover cluster deployment has different prerequisites, such as supported disk bus types, supported resiliency types, and the required minimum number of disks.

By default, available disks are included in a pool that is named the primordial pool. If no primordial pool is listed under STORAGE POOLS, this situation indicates that the storage doesn't meet the requirements for Storage Spaces. Make sure that the disks meet the requirements that are outlined in the Prerequisites section.

On the Specify a storage pool name and subsystem page, enter a name and optional description for the storage pool, select the group of available physical disks that you want to use, and then select Next.

The following Windows PowerShell cmdlet or cmdlets perform the same function as the preceding procedure. Enter each cmdlet on a single line, even though they may appear word-wrapped across several lines here because of formatting constraints.

Next, you must create one or more virtual disks from the storage pool. When you create a virtual disk, you can select how the data is laid out across the physical disks. This selection affects both reliability and performance. You can also select whether to create thin- or fixed-provisioned disks.

If you select a layout where you do not have enough physical disks, you receive an error message when you select Next. For information about which layout to use and the disk requirements, see Prerequisites.

If you selected Mirror as the storage layout, and you've five or more disks in the pool, the Configure the resiliency settings page appears. Select one of the following options:

With thin provisioning, space is allocated on an as-needed basis. This selection optimizes the use of available storage. However, because this setting enables you to over-allocate storage, you must carefully monitor how much disk space is available.

With fixed provisioning, the storage capacity is allocated immediately, at the time, a virtual disk is created. Therefore, fixed provisioning uses space from the storage pool that is equal to the virtual disk size.

With Storage Spaces, you can create both thin- and fixed-provisioned virtual disks in the same storage pool. For example, you can use a thin-provisioned virtual disk to host a database and a fixed-provisioned virtual disk to host the associated log files.

If you use a storage layout other than simple, the virtual disk uses more free space than the size that you specify. To avoid a potential error in which the size of the volume exceeds the storage pool free space, select the Create the largest virtual disk possible, up to the specified size check box.

The following Windows PowerShell cmdlets perform the same function as the preceding procedure. Enter each cmdlet on a single line, even though they may appear word-wrapped across several lines here because of formatting constraints.

To verify that the volume was created, in Server Manager, select the Volumes page. The volume is listed under the server where it was created. You can also verify that the volume was created in Windows Explorer.

Storage Spaces can help protect your data from drive failures. It's a technology in Windows and Windows Server and is conceptually similar to redundant array of independent disks (RAID), implemented in software. You can use Storage Spaces to group three or more drives into a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create Storage Spaces. These drives typically store extra copies of your data, so if one of your drives fails, you still have an intact copy of your data. If you run low on capacity, just add more drives to the storage pool.

Windows Server 2019 has an interesting feature that allows you to group your drives together and create Storage Pools. It even allows you to create tiered storage (that is, specify which drives are fast (SSD) vs slow (HDD)). I've always built my RAIDs using hardware (Dell PERC). So why would someone use Storage spaces in Windows Server? What's the benefit? Would you still create a hardware RAID and then also implement Storage Pools?

Generally speaking you will want to keep hardware- and software based storage solutions separate: Both want direct access to the disks to do their job properly, and there's a high chance they'll trip each other up if combined. The general recommendation is to use an HBA rather than a RAID controller for software driven storage.

This, of course, is a lot less of a problem with today's multi-core, multi-GHz CPUs than it was when server CPUs had single cores and operated in the tens or hundreds of MHz. In fact, companies like VMware and Proxmox actively encourage the use of software storage solutions for many workloads, and there are companies like Backblaze that make their entire living off storage which doesn't use hardware RAID controllers.

From what I gather, Storage Spaces plus ReFS have matured a lot in the last few years, and Microsoft's sales pitch for it looks very similar to, for example, that of VMware's for vSAN. Be aware that this solution doesn't seem to be marketed as a general purpose file system yet: it still lacks features you'll likely miss compared to NTFS.

With Windows Server 2019, Server manager includes simple and easy to use, user interface that enables management of Windows
Storage Spaces and other Storage Subsystems such as EMC Clariion VNX and Dell EqualLogic (but not limited to these) storage arrays with supporting SMI-S and SMP based Storage provider respectively.

Now select the disks you want to create storage pool also you can select a disk as a hot spare which is for failover clustering/ if a disk fails then the Hot spare disk will work and save the files from being deleted.

Select a provisioning type then click Next. The thin option uses space from the storage pool as needed, up to volume size and the fixed option uses from the storage pool equal to the volume size.

Specify the size of the virtual disk or select maximum size then click Next. If you specify the size the remaining size will be offline and not used and if you select the maximum size it will select all the size of the storage pool.

Specify the size of the disk, or let it by default then click Next. If the volume size will be specified, the remaining size will be offline and unused, it can be configured separately from it.

Abou is a highly experienced IT professional with over 13 years in the industry. He is a Senior Cloud & Infra Security Consultant in Paris and previously worked in Ghana. He is certified in Microsoft Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure Security, and Microsoft 365 Security. Abou was the first Microsoft MVP in Ghana and the first Microsoft Azure MVP in sub-Saharan Africa. He has expertise in cloud solutions architecture, migrations/deployments, systems administration, and virtualization. He is also a community leader, speaker, and blogger. He regularly speaks and organizes events on Microsoft Azure, Cybersecurity, Microsoft 365, and Windows Server.

(**Some other disks configurations such as using dynamic disks or disk associated to a windows server cluster storage will also mark the physical disk as not appropriate to be added to a storage pool.)

Checked PS and Server Manager and everything is now healthy again. However, the pool still does not appear in Control Panel. Restarted server after pool was healthy, but still nothing in Control Panel.

So, I after shifting everything on to the 2 3TB drives, I connected the remaining 4 drives to Storage Spaces, created a space, then copied the files from the 2 populated drives into the space (parity resilience). After adding the two drives back to the space (sequentially), all the drives were at around 50% usage, but the 3TB drives where at 20% and 0% respective to when they had been cleared and added to the pool.

So, once all my files and disks where in the pool, I physically disconnected (USB in my case, in your case you could probably just disable the device) one of the fuller disks. Storage Spaces then started showing an error about "Reduced Resiliency", and gave me the option to remove the disk from the pool, which I did.

I then waited several hours (started it in the morning, went to work, came back to a finished screen) while Storage Spaces then repaired the spaces. Once the space had been repaired, I reconnected the disk, formatted it, and reintroduced it to the pool.