18
votes
Mixing disks of different sizes in a Storage Spaces pool
These are the document you are looking for:What are columns and how does Storage Spaces decide how many to use? and Storage Spaces - Designing for Performance and Storage Spaces: Understanding ...
- 7,059
13
votes
Accepted
Scale-Out File Server with Storage Spaces Direct
Your scenario is fine if you are OK with paying loads of money for licensing. You will also need an interconnect fabrics and switch that supports PFC in order to use SMB Direct feature (I assume you ...
- 5,115
12
votes
Accepted
Does a raid controller use cache in JBOD mode?
All on-board caches are completely bypassed in JBOD mode. If you really need to use them you might want to look at a single-disk RAID0 config, which is unsupported but works with S2D as long as you ...
- 14.1k
12
votes
Windows Storage Spaces - a useful replacement for RAID6?
Windows Parity Spaces are dog slow and (according to Microsoft) aren’t designed for anything except archive workloads. Microsoft keeps trying to improve write performance say implemented log missing ...
- 14.1k
11
votes
Accepted
Do we need SCVMM in order to test Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016?
Currently we suggest SCVMM to our customers only in cases of four and more nodes.
I can’t tell for sure whether you need SCVMM in your case, but our last customer with four servers and over 100 VMs ...
- 126
11
votes
Accepted
Storage Spaces Direct guidelines
Speaking shortly, the deployment sequence looks as following:
Deploy necessary WS roles and features
Validate the Failover Cluster
Create the Failover Cluster
Enable Storage Spaces Direct
-...
- 6,249
9
votes
Scale-Out File Server with Storage Spaces Direct
There's very little to zero sense building SoFS based on S2D. Here's why:
1) Datacenter edition everywhere. It's expensive ($6K+), and while for hyperconverged scenario you pay for licensed Windows ...
- 14.1k
9
votes
Accepted
How does Windows Storage Space deal with partition fragmentation? Will this cause performance issues?
Slabs which are file system cluster equivalents are quite big. So yes, you’ll get fragmentation but no, you won’t notice any performance impact. Really.
- 14.1k
8
votes
Accepted
How much space NAS snapshots consume?
Most NAS snapshots implement copy-on-write, so the snapshot itself initially takes up no space (or next-to-none, there is some overhead). But any block that is changed whilst the file it's part of is ...
- 80.6k
8
votes
Storage Space Write cache, and write speed
This postponed write happens because of a a) file system level write-back RAM cache, and b) parity Spaces design, which absorbs all the writes to the internal log initially to avoid “read-modify-write”...
- 14.1k
8
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to ask ReFS to use hardware RAID6 for parity calculations?
ReFS is much like ZFS in general. They both are completely CPU oriented and do not use anything from hardware RAID controllers.
Other vendors (for example StarWind with LSFS) are using hardware ...
- 5,115
8
votes
Accepted
How to use part of a disk for Storage Spaces?
TL;DR: You can't do that. If you really want to do that you have to use sort of a storage virtualization stack on top of your disks. Something like HPE VSA will use your existing partitioning and ...
- 14.1k
8
votes
Windows Storage Spaces, can I stripe across 3 disks and on top mirror to a 4th disk?
I have 4 HDD drives and want to maximize read performance with 1 level of resiliency.
You can deploy MSFT's equivalent of RAID10. Please see what columns have to do with redundancy and performance.
...
- 14.1k
8
votes
Accepted
Default behavior of Storage Spaces Direct results in what capacity?
1) There are many ways to skin a cat (c) ... Depending on how you'll chop your disks and how you'll configure system (HDDs + SSDs for cache Vs. mirror accelerated parity etc) you'll get different ...
- 14.1k
7
votes
Is it possible to ask ReFS to use hardware RAID6 for parity calculations?
ReFS (and Storage Spaces Direct from Windows Server 2016 if you care) takes care indeed of some hardware offload features present in Intel Xeon CPUs (they somehow refuse to work if f.e. "popcnt" ...
- 14.1k
7
votes
Storage Spaces Direct very low available space
I vote for shared storage. For the case, StarWind Virtual SAN Free seems to be a better option. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct are more about Enterprise having requirements to underlying storage and ...
- 3,918
7
votes
Accepted
Storage Spaces Direct MTBF
Microsoft recommends % of usable capacity, "2 disks" is too bold statement for say 90 disk JBOD.
- 14.1k
7
votes
Accepted
Is there any way to prevent Storage Spaces Direct from automatically adding disks?
Yes, you can disable the auto-pooling behavior. The experience is not great, but it’s certainly do-able and supported. The setting name, and example cmdlet syntax, is in the Settings section of this ...
7
votes
Accepted
Is there a reason to use a Storage Pool instead of creating a RAID-5 Volume?
It's a bad idea to use parity Storage Spaces because:
1) Single parity is dangerous: every time one disk dies and you start a rebuild process there's a heavy load applied to all remaining spindles, ...
- 14.1k
7
votes
Is there a reason to use a Storage Pool instead of creating a RAID-5 Volume?
Unless you're doing a HEAVILY read-oriented system, Storage Spaces Parity mode is less than optimal. I'd strongly suggest using the Mirror mode. Do note that Mirror in Storage Spaces is NOT RAID1. It ...
- 366
7
votes
Default behavior of Storage Spaces Direct results in what capacity?
The considered setup will result in 6 TB of usable capacity and 1 TB of cache per node.
You can always check it with this calculator:
https://s2dcalc.blob.core.windows.net/www/index.html
I would ...
- 9,126
7
votes
ReFS with or without hardware RAID? With or without storage spaces?
ReFS by itself cannot repair corruptions, it is a feature of Storage Spaces. But ReFS will detect them when on files with data integrity stream enabled when reading the corrupted block, or when ReFS ...
- 9,126
6
votes
Storage Spaces Direct (s2d) wrong BusType with raid controller in HBA mode
I have faced exactly the same issue trying to create a 2-node dedicated S2D storage cluster for one of the branch offices. Bus type RAID is a no go and I had to replace the 3108 controllers with some ...
- 6,249
6
votes
Slow storage spaces direct S2D setup
You really need RDMA-capable 10 GbE for your backbone connectivity. 4x1GbE is simply not enough for Storage Spaces Direct. Get Mellanox ConnectX3 or similar cards, you can get used/refurb cheap from ...
- 14.1k
6
votes
Slow storage spaces direct S2D setup
I may try the 10GBe cards. Trying to pinpoint and prove that its networking that is holding me back. I just can't find evidence of it.
RDMA-capable 10GbE NICs is kinda a requirement for S2D. Also, ...
- 6,249
6
votes
Accepted
Storage Spaces Direct HDD MediaType is unspecified
You have to have supported media types with Storage Spaces Direct which is no-RAID, no-FC and no-iSCSI. Should be SATA, SAS and NVMe.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-...
- 14.1k
6
votes
HP Proliant DL360 G8 & G9 with SAMSUNG PM863a SSDs
Unfortunately, Storage Spaces Direct has hardware limitations which mean that even if you succeed with a workaround for this issue final configuration will not be supported anyway.
If Storage Spaces ...
- 6,249
6
votes
Accepted
How does Windows write cache work with mounted VHDs?
Virtual machine I/O isn't cached, it's very easy to check actually: run Process Manager which incapsulates old FileMon functionality and watch your .vhd(x) files access flags - should be ...
- 14.1k
6
votes
Storage Spaces Direct detect and change Resiliency Mode
1) There are no automatic rebuilds with S2D, every time you add new node you have to re-create the pools with the newer resiliency option and migrate your data.
2) S2D has horrible resilience with ...
- 14.1k
6
votes
Storage Spaces Direct detect and change Resiliency Mode
In order to change the resiliency settings of your existing volumes you have to recreate the volumes/pools with new resiliency setting and migrate the data. S2D only re-balances the data between newly ...
- 6,249
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible