possible.
Management was quite painful, and RAID volumes could not be resized easily.
It was not supported in a failover cluster.Storage Space Basics
Storage Spaces was introduced in Windows Server 2012 as a completely new way to
think about managing and using direct-attached storage. With Storage Spaces, the
physical disks providing the underlying storage of data are completely abstracted from
the process of requesting new volumes, now known as spaces, and any actions
required to restore data redundancy in the event of a disk failure are performed
automatically by the Storage Spaces technology, as long as there are sufficient physical
disks available. Storage Spaces provides a software-defined storage solution that while
utilizing local storage, provides highly available and scalable storage solutions.
I’m going to walk you through Storage Spaces by focusing on its incarnation in
Windows Server 2012, how it changed in Windows Server 2012 R2, and then what it
has become in Windows Server 2016. It’s useful to explore the capabilities in each
version of Windows Server and to see how Storage Spaces has evolved, in order to help
better understand it.
The first step is to create a storage pool, which is a selection of one or more physical
disks that are then pooled together and can be used by the Storage Spaces technology.
Supported disk types in a storage pool are USB-, SATA-, and SAS-connected disks.
These disks are just standard disks, JBOD, such as HDD, SSDs, and even NVMe for
the best performance. With no hardware high availability such as RAID behind the
scenes, Storage Spaces takes care of fault tolerance. The use of USB-connected drives
is great on the desktop side, while servers focus on SATA- and SAS-connected drives.
Additionally, shared SAS is fully supported, which means a disk enclosure could be
used that is then connected to numerous hosts in a cluster, and the storage space
created on those shared SAS drives is available to all nodes in the cluster and can be
used as part of Cluster Shared Volumes. This allows a cluster of Hyper-V hosts to use
a clustered storage space as the storage for virtual machines. If an external disk
enclosure is used, Storage Spaces supports the SES protocol, which enables failure
indications on the external storage if available, such as a bad disk LED in the event
Storage Spaces detects a problem with a physical disk. Although many storage
enclosures work with clustered storage spaces, Microsoft does have several certified
enclosures for Windows Server 2012, which are documented at the Windows Server
Catalog.
Other technologies, like BitLocker, can also be used with Storage Spaces. When a new
storage pool is created, the disks that are added to the storage pool will disappear from
the Disk Management tool because they are now virtualized and used exclusively by
the Storage Spaces technology. The disks’ state can be seen through the Storage Pools
view within File and Storage Services in Server Manager.