We have a Storage Spaces Direct Cluster now what? Wouldn’t it be nice to maybe create a HyperConverged Virtual Machine on it or present some storage for a Scale out File Server (SOFS).

Well fortunately we have another Good News Scenario for you.

Guess what it is?

 

………..

 

Is the suspense killing you ?

It only takes a single line of PowerShell to make this magic happen.

So let’s have a look shall we.

 

 

 

 

Provision Storage Virtual Disks (CSV)

 

As we are in only a 2 node S2D configuration we cannot take advantage of the Multi-Resilient volumes. We are left with limited choices that include only a 2-way Mirror for protection. That ok though because we are testing this for a small branch office scenario or test lab.

 

The PowerShell command below will create a Virtual Disk called Mirror using the CSV File System and be formatted using ReFS. It will have a maximum size of 200 TB in this configuration.

New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName S2DPool -FriendlyName Mirror -FileSystem CSVFS_REFS -Size 200GB -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 1 

 

Note: Remember that it is extremely important to understand that once you have created a Virtual Disk with it’s resiliency settings it cannot be changed. It needs to be migrated to a different volume with different resiliency settings. In the case of Hyper-V this can be done by using Storage Live Migration in the same way that you would move data from a Lun to Lun.

 

Here we can see the newly presented Virtual Disk in Failover Cluster Manager.

 

Failover Cluster Manager view of S2D Volumes

 

 

As you can see below the newly created volume shows up as C:\ClusterStoreage\Volume1.

 

S2D CSV Volume

 

I have had to work with a lot of Storage Technologies in the past and trust me configuring a Fibre Channel LUN or ISCSI Target is not this easy.

Yes, you need to do a lot of the work in PowerShell but this is a good thing.

Stay tuned for Part #10 in this blog series where we will use some cool PowerShell Scripts that the Microsoft Storage Product has made available to get some information about our volumes.

Happy Learning…

 

Thanks,

 

Cristal

 

Cristal Kawula

Cristal Kawula is the co-founder of MVPDays Community Roadshow and #MVPHour live Twitter Chat. She was also a member of the Gridstore Technical Advisory board and is the President of TriCon Elite Consulting. Cristal is also only the 2nd woman in the world to receive the prestigious Veeam Vanguard award.

 

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Twitter: @supercristal1 / @mvpdays / #mvphour

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