Extra session where I ran to in this slot after previous one ended very early. This one is on storage pools and spaces. Speaker has a Dell 1U server with a bunch of internal unallocated disks. Uses PSH to:
- New-StoragePool (Get-StorageSubsystem and Get-PhysicalDisk) The command pools all un-pooled disks. The disks appear from Disk Manager because they are pooled.
- A space (which is a virtual disk) is created: New-VirtualDisk
- Initialize-Disk is run to initialise it.
- New-Partition formats the disk which is visible in disk manager and can be explored. Note that it has a drive letter.
Optimized Space Utilisation
- On-demand provisioning with trim (h/w command that gives space back to the pool when files are deleted) support – for NTFS, Hyper-V, and apps like SQL.
- Elastic capacity expansion by just adding more disks. You’ll get alerts when nearly full.
- Defrag optimized to work with Storage Pools
Resiliency:
- Mirrored spaces and Parity Spaces with integrated journaling supported.
- Per-pool hot spare disk supported
- Application driven intelligent error correction: SQL and Exchange should be able to take advantage of this.
Not very well explained – sorry.
Demo: he plays a video that is stored on a resilient space and pulls a disk from it. The video is uninterrupted.
Spaces have granular access control. Could be good for multi-tenant deployment – I’m hesitant of that because it means giving visibility of the back end system to untrusted customers (rule #1 is users are stupid).
You can base SLA on the type of disks in your JBOD, e.g. SSD, 15K or SATA. Your JBOD could be connected to a bunch of servers. They can create spaces for themselves. E.g. a file server could have spaces, and use the disk space to store clustered VMs.
Questions to sfsquestions@microsoft.com