Microsoft Azure AZ-800 — Section 19: Configure Windows Server storage

144. Configure disks and volumes

It’s now time to discuss the concept of working with disk in volumes, file systems and all that fun stuff on our server now to begin with, the first thing I want to do, though, is I’m going to add additional virtual disk to my server so that I can actually play around with this. All right.

So here I am in Hyper-V and I’m going to right click on my N.Y.C. server one. I’m going to go to settings right up under my scuzzy controller. I’m just going to add another hard drive, so, I’m just going to click Add and the new click next. I’m going to do dynamically expanding. All right. And then from there, I’ll just call this data disk. All right, and we’ll click next. How big do you want it to be? Let’s just make it 60 gigs. All right, and we’ll click next and then finish. And we’ve now added the second disk. At that point, we can jump right into our virtual machine and we should see that the disk is available.

OK, so open up server manager here and then go over here to where it says file and storage services. All right, and let’s click on disk and we should see that we have this additional disk ready to go. All right.

So here it is, right. Here is our additional disk. And So, it’s ready to go. Keep in mind if you ever add a disk and it says it’s off-line, you can always right click and say, bring online.

So the next step, of course, is for dealing with this to create a volume on that disk or multiple volumes. I’d also like to show you that we’re doing this the server manager, but you can also right click the Start button and you can go to disk management. This man is sort of the older tool that lets you work with disk. You’ll notice right out of the gates that it’s going to try to ask if I want to initialize that.

So you have to bring a disk online. You need to initialize the disk initialize and just allows it to put its master boot code on the disk. There’s a couple different options for master boot code you have in the air, which is the old style, and you have GPT, which is the newer style. The old style NBR has been around since the early 80s. It was created by IBM back in the day and you could only partition your disk into four separate partitions, OK? It also limited due to limited you to two terabytes of space on a partition.

So those are your that’s your main limitation. You also could only use the drive letters through Z in the alphabet.

Now, if you use a GPT grid partition Table, you can take advantage of some of the more advanced features that server has to offer with with your file systems, including with GPT. We can have up to 128 different partitions we can have, so, we can go beyond just the letters of the alphabet. We can actually name drives based on words, but also, we can have beyond two terabytes.

So you can get in the exabyte range worth of space on partition.

So, it is normally the one that you would go with. If you do this through server manager, it’ll forest you to use GPT.

OK.

So just to kind of show you what I mean, if I go over here server manager and a right click and I say initialize, it’s going to go ahead and ask you, Hey, it’s going to initialize is going to use GPT and that’s just a server manager’s going to do that now. That creates our disk from there. If we want to create a volume on the disk, we can do that right here through this wizard. Click next. All right. And then from there, specify the disc, which is obviously disc one. How big do you want it to be? OK.

So, if I wanted to do maybe 30 gigs out of the volume and then we can give it a drive letter drive letter E! Click next. All right, which filesystem do you want to use or choose? NTFS it’s the normal file system most everybody uses. I just call this data volume. All right, click next and then click Create. And it’s going to create the volume.

So, I now have one volume on that disk and I could create a separate volume if I want. All right.

So let’s go right here. Go back. Let it to refresh. There you go. You can also click the refresh button up here.

So, it did create that, that volume there. We want to click Tasker and create another volume. Click Next. Next! Let’s do the other 30 gigs, the remaining 30 gigs, and we’ll drive left for this in this time. If we want, we can go with RTX.

OK, so, we’ll just call this back up. Maybe, it’s for backup. Click next and click Create. And it’s going to go through the process of creating an aria. That’s a resilient file. That’s a newer file system that Microsoft came out with a few years ago that has better resiliency than TFS, although there are some limitations with it not going to get into that right now. If I open up File Explorer, then I should notice that both of these drives are available. All right. The other thing I want to show you is that there is a command that Microsoft has had for quite a long time. Also, that involves being able to kind of manipulate your disk if you go to either PowerShell or command prompt. The command is called disk part.

So the escape route.

So people that want to write scripts and things, you can use disk parts to do that. But you can also go right into this part because it’s his own command show. It’s pretty easy command to use. If you just take a question mark, you can actually see all of the different commands that are available.

OK? And there’s a command called list.

So, if I type list, I can see says, What do you want to list? Basically disk partitions volumes v a virtual disk.

So, I’ll say list disk. You can see that it shows that there’s two disk.

Now watch what happens if I say list partition. It says that I haven’t selected a disc, so there’s another command called Select.

So, if you type list disc, you can then type, select and then whatever disc you want to look at, like disc one, that’s the new disc that I just added, OK, select disc one. There we go. And now if we if we type list partition, we can see the partitions or there’s as you can see, there’s three partitions. It created a little reserved partition for the four system information and then the two actual partitions. We can also see list volume and we can see volume information on the whole entire machine here.

So you see the different drive letters associated with everything. All right. And so for the most part, you can do a lot of lot of things utilizing this tool. You can use the server manager or you can use good old fashioned disk management, which of course, has been around since the beginning. And pretty much you just do right clicks to do everything. But ultimately that is how we can. We’ve added a couple of we’ve added a disk now and we’ve created a couple of volumes and easy to manipulate on a Windows server.

145. Configure and manage Storage Spaces

Now, Microsoft includes a feature that’s been around for a few years now and server that’s meant to give us better control over having multiple hard drives and volumes on those hard drives as features cold storage spaces now with storage spaces. This again, the ultimate goal is to basically allow us to have more control over our drives. Imagine you’ve got a server, you’ve got multiple hard drives in that server and you want to set up volumes on it. The problem is, is that what are you going to do? You’re going to set up like, you know, if you had three drives, you’re going to set up three different volumes of three different drive letters. Would it be great if you could just connect all that together? And then would it be great if you could also provide redundancy for that? Well, you can.

Now, a lot of you probably are aware of hardware based raid and all that, but this doesn’t require you to have any special hardware. You just need the drives in the server and then you can actually connect them all together into what we call a storage pool. From there, you can.

So, so, let’s say you, you know, you have three drives that are one hundred twenty seven gigs apiece, which is kind of what I’m going to demo here. You know, you can combine all those together and then you can take all of that space that’s in the stores for and you can make virtual drives that sit on top of that. And these virtual drives can be combined to provide redundancy, mirroring or parity. All right. And so this what you’re really going to get out of this. It’s a it’s a great feature. It gives you more control now. I will say hardware based raid solutions and all that is generally the better it accepTable way to do things. But if you are especially in a smaller environment and you just got to get, you want to get some redundancy and you don’t have a hardware based controllers or whatever to help you do that, or maybe you’re working with virtualization where there’s, you know, you’re in a virtual environment, not a hardware based environment, and you need to provide some redundancy. This a great way to do that.

So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to add some more disk to my server, right? To do that, I’m going to right click my server here in Hyper-V and go to Settings. And here’s my scuzzy controller. I have this disk I created previously that my data disk, I’m actually going to remove that, OK? And now I’m going to add, go right here I could. I could use that disk, but I’m not going to. I’m going to create some more.

So, I’m going to click Add from there, I’m going to click new, all right, dynamic expanding, and we’ll just going to call this. Storage space disc one.

OK. Click. To create it, it’s going to be a hundred and twenty seven gigs, that’s fine. All right. And I’m going to create another new disc. I’m actually going to create three.

OK. All right.

So, we’re going to go new next dynamic expanding, and we’ll call this storage space disc two hundred and twenty seven gigs or find finish. It’s dynamically expanding, So, it’s not going to take up too much space. And then finally, we’ll do one more. All right.

So new next dynamic expanding, and we’ll call this number three.

OK, we’re going to go ahead next and finish. We created three days that are hundred twenty seven gigs apiece, and So, we’re good to go. We’re now ready to jump into our virtual machine.

OK, so here I am on NYC server one. I’m going to go to server manager and go to file and storage services, and we’re going to click on disk and we should see that our three disk are showing up. If you ever do this, ever add disk and it’s not showing up, just click the little refresh icon. It’ll take a moment it should show up, but I want to go here to storage pools now. And here it is. It’s telling me I’ve got primordial primarily just means it’s a it’s a the original disk that’s on this drive here or that’s in the machine.

So that’s fine. And I’ve got three more physical disks that I could use.

So from there, with creating a store’s pool within storage spaces, I’m going to go down here. What says virtual disk? I’m going to click to create a virtual disk, So, it’s going to bring up this little screen here, and then I’m going to click to create a storage pool.

So, it’s going to bring up the storage pool wizard from there, I’m going to click next. All right.

So, so sorry. Specify a storage pool name and subsystem. I’m going to call it pool one. All right. Because as always, I’m so original with my names. All right, I’m specifying the NYC server one. This where it’s going to go. Click next and it says, All right, you got the three disk. Which disk would you like to make a part of this? So, I’m going to make all three, but notice it gives me an allocation option. And so, I can do automatic, which is going to let the system manage it. I can do hot spare, which is basically going to make it where I can make a disk, just a spare disk. It’s not going to be used unless I run out of space on these disk.

OK, So, it’s just a spare disk. It would use it if it needed to, or I can do manual, which allows me to just manually decide, OK, I’m going to use this space or I’m not going to use this space, so, I’m going to do automatic let the system handle it. That’s what Microsoft recommends anyway. And then we’re going to click to create. And at that point, it is going to create the little storage pool. And we now officially have our stores full created.

Now we’re going to click on pull one here and then to create, and we’re going to create a virtual disk by clicking here on this link. This all right. Specify the pool you’re wanting. I’m going to create this virtual disk on this pool. All right, and then from there, I’m going to click next. All right. It’s asking me what I want to call this virtual desk.

OK, so let’s let’s call this just kind of give it a name. I’m going to say important data desk. All right. I’m going to click next. All right. And so, Is enclosure awareness stores copies of your data on separate storage enclosures? J boards just a bunch of disk if you don’t know what that acronym stands for, helping to protect your data.

OK, we don’t have what is known as enclosures set up right here, and this gets into having the right hardware to do this.

So, I’m not going to expand on that right now, but I’m going to click next.

So from there, we have an option of just doing simple volume. All right. We can do mirroring or we can do parody. All right.

So simple volume is just going to create a volume on the disk and it’ll let you use the maximum amount of space that you want. But the problem is that you don’t get any redundancy with a simple volume you can do mirroring. A lot of people know that as raid one redundant array of independent disk or the older acronym, which is redundant raven expensive disk, whichever one you prefer, but ultimately mirroring will require you to have a couple of disk. All right, in order to do that, if you’re just going to do what’s called a two way mirror now, you can do a three way mirror. And if you but you do have to have at least five disk five disk in order to do that, so.

So two way mirrors is going to require you to have two disk, three way mirror is going to require you to have five disk, OK, and you’re going to get a lot of fault tolerance out of that two way mirror to simply means it’s going to replicate all your data to both disk simultaneously. One disk fails. You’ve got another disk going in the three way mirror. Obviously, you can lose two disk and still be in business. Optionally, you can also go with parity now with parity. You have to have three disk to use parity and with parity. You can also kind of do the same thing. You can. You can provide extra redundancy if you lose a disk you’re still in in in business at that point. If you want to do a two disk failure system, you can have what you have up to seven disk. You could lose two disk and still be up and going.

So a lot of people would call that raid five and raid six, raid five being just what we call striping with parity, which was a three disk system. And then, of course, you could do raid six, which was in this case, you have to have seven disk in order to handle that. All right. It’s a little different than hardware based raid, though the rules are a little different with hardware based rate, you may say, Well, John, that’s not the that’s not the same as, you know, hardware based because hardware based didn’t require all that. All right. And so, it is a little different for hardware.

OK, I’m going to go with mirroring and we’re going to click next and then I can do thin or fixed provisioning.

So what’s the difference here? Well, you remember dynamically expanding disk. It’s the same idea in Hyper-V. Disk thin provisioning is going to make it where it’s not going to use up all of your space. It will use it as needed and not actually consume the full amount of space. And then fixed provisioning is going to go ahead and just use all the space.

So fixed provisioning is going to give you the best performance because the problem within provisioning is as it grows, it kind of slows things down as it’s growing.

So to get the best performance, you’d want to go with fixed provision. But in a lab environment like I’m in, thin provisioning is good, so, I’m going to go with thin provisioning, then I’m going to click next. From there, I’m going to specify what size disk I want. I’m going to do 60 gigs and then I’m going to click next. And at that point, I’m going to click to create.

OK, So, we’re letting that run, and we’ve now officially got it. We’re going to hit close.

So then the next thing is it’s going to ask you to go ahead and set up your volume. That’s going to be all minus this.

So, I’m going to click next. All right.

So there it is. Important data disc, which is a 60 gig virtual disk that’s actually spanning three actual disk in a mere format. We’re going to click next and then the volume size is 60 gigs. We’ll click next. Specify the drive letter OK, how about I do the letter M for Mir? All right, we’ll click next and then watch file system. Do you want? OK. I’m going to go ahead and say important data. All right. Click next and create and we’ve now created our volume on our disk. All right.

So she’s going through the process of formatting and all that will hit close. And if we open up File Explorer, we should be able to see that that disk is available. All right.

So, we get store data on it.

OK, so now that’s that’s one, you know, that’s one virtual disk we’ve created. If we wanted, we could actually go and create another virtual disk because we got extra space right so, we could go through here. We’ll just call it extra disk just for, you know, quick name. And then from there, maybe we do simple or poor whatever we want to do then or fixed next, specify we’ll do about 30 gigs this time, OK? Next and create. And it’s now creating that other day, so notice I’ve created basically. A storage pool and on the store’s pool, I’ve created virtual disk that I can then go through and format, right? So there’s just five.

So the system sees it as an actual virtual disk. 30 gigs will give it, you know, drive letter e next and this time will do RDF s. All right. Change it up a little bit. Click Create. We are now creating our next volume here.

OK, so as you can see, very easy to use stores pools in regards to Windows Server. And we should be able to go and verify that this there. And yet there it is.

So, we got our we got our extra disk here.

So again, very easy to set up this and just gives you a little bit more control over your disk. And I will say that in the real world, people generally like to lean towards real hardware raid because this a software based raid solution, essentially so that all of this fails. You can you can keep going and recover. Of course, you’ll get a you’ll get mess, you’ll get a message if that was to ever happen. Of course, again, in the real world, I think most people agree. Hardware based raid systems are better, but this a software based, redundant system that will allow you to set up running an array of independent disk on a server without having to have any additional hardware other than the drives.