Storage Spaces Tiering in Windows Server 2016

The goal of Storage Spaces is to create highly available storage solution that has all the advantages of SAN (power and flexibility),but is significantly cheaper.Storage spaces “virtualizes” storage (which consist of HDD and SSD.A storage pool is a container that is used to group physical disks (mixing SSD and HDD).It provides the ability to store more frequently accessed data on SSD media,with both types of media used as block based storage for the same virtual disk: the best of both types of storage

In this lab i used machine VMWare workstation VM with 4 HDD and 2 SSD disks (each with 10 GB)

To simulate SSD disk in VMWare,we need to edit virtual machine’s vmx file

scsix:y.virtualSSD=1,where x:y is scsi disk number

Check VM configuration:

Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true | sort size |ft deviceid,friendlyname,canpool,size,mediatype -AutoSize

As we can see,non-SSD disks are specified as “unspecified”,we need to set its media type as HDD,in order to avoid errors

Get-PhysicalDisk | where MediaType -EQ unspecified | where Size -LT 60GB | Set-PhysicalDisk -MediaType HDD

i used filter to exclude system disk (60 GB) because that disk won’t be member of storage pool

Get-PhysicalDisk | sort size |ft deviceid,friendlyname,canpool,size,mediatype -AutoSize

Create storage pool

$pool=Get-StorageSubSystem
New-StoragePool -StorageSubSystemUniqueId $pool.UniqueId -FriendlyName mypool -PhysicalDisks (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true)

Get-StoragePool mypool | Get-PhysicalDisk | ft FriendlyName,MediaType,Size

Configuring Tiers

As we mentioned before,we need to create storage tiers to group SSD and HDD media types

Get-StoragePool mypool | New-StorageTier –FriendlyName HDDTier –MediaType HDD
Get-StoragePool mypool | New-StorageTier -FriendlyName SSDTier -MediaType SSD

Get Pool capacity

Get-StoragePool mypool | fl Size,AllocatedSize

Storage Spaces reserves 256 MB for each disk (6×256=1,5 GB)

Get Tier capacity

HDD tier (mirror):

Get-StorageTierSupportedSize hddtier -ResiliencySettingName mirror | ft -AutoSize

If we want to use tier in “mirror” mode,maximum space is 8 GB (10+10)/2

SSD tier 

Get-StorageTierSupportedSize ssdtier -ResiliencySettingName mirror | ft -AutoSize

Maximum free space is 16 GB

Configuring resilency settings

Storage Spaces offers increased performance by striping data across multiple disks,these disks are named NumberOfColumns.NumberOfDataCopiesDefault parameter specifies on how many disks data will be stripped across

Get-StoragePool mypool | Set-ResiliencySetting -Name mirror -NumberOfDataCopiesDefault 2

 Creating mirrored spaces with tiering

$ssd=Get-StorageTier -FriendlyName ssdtier
$hdd=Get-StorageTier -FriendlyName hddtier
Get-StoragePool mypool | New-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName space1 -ResiliencySettingName mirror -StorageTiers $ssd,$hdd -StorageTierSizes 16gb,8gb -WriteCacheSize 1gb
Get-VirtualDisk | ft -AutoSize

Creating Partition and Volume

Get-VirtualDisk Space1 | Get-Disk | Set-Disk -IsReadOnly 0
Get-VirtualDisk Space1 | Get-Disk | Set-Disk -IsOffline 0
Get-VirtualDisk Space1 | Get-Disk | Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle GPT
Get-VirtualDisk Space1 | Get-Disk | New-Partition -DriveLetter "F" -UseMaximumSize
Initialize-Volume -DriveLetter “F” -FileSystem NTFS -Confirm:$false