Windows Server 2012
Storage
Storage Spaces and Thin Provisioning
Harold Wong
Storage Spaces and Thin Provisioning Overview
Why should I care?
Technology Overview
Demo
Storage Spaces and Thin
Provisioning
What is Storage Spaces & Thin
Provisioning?
Storage Spaces
• New in Windows Server 2012
• Provides an in-box storage virtualization that can use low-cost commodity storage devices • Aggregates unallocated space on physical disks installed in or connected to servers through
a “pooling” model
• Can provide a cost-effective platform for business critical storage across a variety of scenarios
Thin Provisioning
• “Just-in-Time” allocations of storage with the ability to reclaim storage (“Trim”) • Integrated with Storage Spaces
Storage Spaces and Thin
Provisioning
Why should I care?
Storage pools• Can be mapped to combinations of hard disks as well as solid-state drives (SSDs)
• Can be expanded dynamically by simply adding additional drives, thereby seamlessly scaling to cope with unceasing data growth
Multitenancy
• Administration of storage pools can be controlled through access control lists (ACLs) and delegated on a per-pool basis
• Can be fully integrated with Active Directory Domain Services
Resilient storage
• Storage Spaces support two optional resiliency modes (mirroring and parity) • Per-pool support for disks that are reserved for replacing failed disks (hot
spares), background scrubbing, and intelligent error correction allow continuous service availability despite storage component failures
The features of Storage Spaces are designed to meet a variety of challenges in support of highly-available storage
Why should I care?
(cont.)
Continuous Availability
• Failover clustering integration delivers continuously available service deployments
• One or more pools can be clustered across multiple nodes within a single
cluster. Storage spaces can then be instantiated on individual nodes, and the storage will seamlessly fail over to a different node when necessary (in response to failure conditions or due to load balancing)
• Integration with CSVs permits scale-out access to data
Optimal storage use through thin provisioning
• To allow businesses to easily share storage capacity among multiple unrelated data sets and thereby maximize capacity use
• Trim support permits capacity reclamation when possible
Operational simplicity
• Easily managed through the File Services role in Server Manager
• Fully remoteable and scriptable management through the Windows Storage Management API, WMI, and Windows PowerShell
• Designed to be compatible with existing backup-restore and cloning tools, as well as snapshotting infrastructures
Storage Spaces and Thin
Provisioning
Storage Spaces Requirements
• The criterion for determining which drives are eligible to be part of a Pool are: • Minimum drive size is 10 GB
• Drive is empty, i.e. no partition data exists on the drive • Drive is not assigned to any other pool
• The Primordial Pool will consist of Physical Disks that are not assigned to any existing Storage Pool
• Windows Server 2012
• Serial ATA (SATA) or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) connected disks (in an optional just-a-bunch-of-disks [JBOD] enclosure)
• Multinode clustered shared-storage deployments • Two or more servers running Windows Server
2012
• Requirements as specified for failover clustering and Windows CSV
• SAS connected JBODs that comply with Windows Certification requirements
Drive
Type Stand-Alone File Servers Clustered File Servers
SATA Supported SCSI Supported
iSCSI Supported Supported SAS Supported Supported USB Supported
How does Storage Spaces Work?
Storage Spaces
Creating a Storage Space
(Virtual Disk)
Data Redundancy in
Storage Spaces
Redundancy
Type Description
Simple • Data is striped across physical disks • Maximizes capacity
• Increases throughput
Mirror • Data is duplicated on two or three physical disks • Increases reliability
• Reduces capacity by 50 to 66 percent
Parity • Data and parity information are striped across physical disks • Increases reliability
Deduplication
• Capacity Optimization • Scale and Performance
Managing Storage with PowerShell
Parameters configured with GUI and PowerShell
• Underlying storage pool name • Virtual disk name
• Resiliency setting (Simple, Mirror, or parity) • Provisioning type (Thin or Fixed)
• Virtual disk size
Parameters configured only with PowerShell
• Number of columns: the number of columns the virtual disk contains
• Number of data copies - number of complete copies of data that can be maintained
• Disk interleave - number of bytes forming a stripe • Physical disks to use - specific disks to use in the
virtual disk
PowerShell is required to access many of the advanced features afforded by the new Storage Management
application programming interface (API)
Integrating Storage Pools
with Failover Clustering
• Clustered Storage Spaces require fixed provisioning
• Clustered virtual disks require underlying hardware to support persistent reservations
Thin Provisioning and Trim
Requirements• Enabled by default in Windows Server 2012
• Storage infrastructure that complies with the certification that is required for Windows Server 2012
• Standards-compliant hardware for identification
Capabilities
• Identification
• Windows Server 2012 uses a standardized method to detect and identify thinly provisioned virtual disks
• Notification
• When configured physical storage use thresholds are reached, Windows Server 2012 notifies the administrator through events; events can be used for automated actions by sophisticated management applications, such as Microsoft System Center
• Optimization
• Windows Server 2012 provides a new API that lets applications return storage when it is no longer needed.
• NTFS issues trim notifications in real time when appropriate.
• Trim notifications are issued as part of storage consolidation (optimization), which is performed regularly on a scheduled basis
