Hi!
The virtualization of hardware layers often makes administrative tasks much easier. Today I want to talk about storage virtualization.
Experience level: Associate.
Let’s say we have a separate hard drive (or SSD, it doesn’t matter in this case) in your organization’s server for database storage. Your organization grows bigger together with the database, and one day you find out that there is no free space left on the device, and the database won’t start.
It is a tedious and time-consuming process: to find a bigger device, to copy all the data from your old drive to the new one. Imagine how it would be easier just to expand your database volume simply by joining a new device.
One solution in a situation like this would be using RAID (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks), but today we are going to talk about different one – Storage Spaces for Windows Server (there is a similar concept in Linux family called Logical Volume Manager or LVM, and we are going to talk about it some other time).
Simply put, it is a logical storage device on top of several physical volumes, where you can add new devices as needed, and your logical storage will grow bigger easily. If required, some redundancy can be added as well.
I will use a virtual machine for demonstration, but this technology is more suitable for bare metal. My setup consists of one Windows Server 2016 on top of one system disk, and there are also two disks for my database storage (500GB each).
This will open the “New Storage Pool Wizard” for you. The first screen is a description of the service, so simply push Next.
The second screen allows you to name your pool, so give it a sensible name like DB-storage-pool, and a description if you want, and hit Next.
This screen allows you to add physical volumes to your storage pool along with spare devices for redundancy (change allocation type from automatic to Hot Spare). I prefer to make backups from my database replicas, so I won’t add a hot spare in this case. So, go next.
Review selections you’ve made on the next screen and click Next if everything looks good.
The final screen confirms everything went smoothly. We can push the Close button at this stage. This will return us to the Storage Pools main Dashboard.
Select your storage pool in the next window and click OK. This will bring up the “New Virtual Disk Wizard”. The first screen contains a brief description, so hit Next to proceed further.
This page of the wizard allows us to give a name and optionally a description for our virtual disk. Name it, leave the checkbox for the storage tiers empty (this feature allows to combine HDDs and SSDs in one pool. It will analyze data storage patterns and put frequently used data on the SSD, which is faster) and go Next.
The next page can add some more redundancy for the storage but requires additional physical volumes, so push Next.
The storage layout allows us to add software RAID features to the virtual storage pool. Mirror will duplicate the content of one disk in the pool to another, which has no sense in our case. Parity will spread data across all the disks in the storage adding parity information to restore the data in case of failure of one of the underlying physical volumes. We do not need it as well, so choose the Simple layout and click Next.
The next step is to choose which provisioning type to use with our storage. The “Thin” option will gradually allocate space from underlying physical volumes as needed during operation. The “Fixed” option will allocate all the available space at once while creating. I’ll stick with the second one, although creating the virtual disk will take additional time, but it will be slightly faster while using. After you made your choice hit Next.
The wizard is asking us further how much space are we going to use for our new virtual drive. I am intending to use all the available space (I took the information from the Storage Pools main Dashboard), which is 998 GB in my case. Press Next when finished.
Revise your choices on the Confirmation page and hit Create.
The final screen confirms everything went smoothly. We can push the Close button at this stage. This will return us to the Storage Pools main Dashboard.
The “New Volume Wizard” gives us brief information on the first page, so click Next when you are ready.
Hit Next after confirming your volume size.
Assign a letter for it on the next page and press Next.
Review your choices on the next page and click Create.
Check results on the next page and Close the wizard.
Next time we are going to talk about how to expand your virtual disk.