Windows:2016

Windows 2016: Storage spaces Direct Overview

• Unrivaled Performance. Whether all-flash or hybrid, Storage Spaces Direct easily exceeds 150,000 mixed 4k random IOPS per server with consistent, low latency thanks to its hypervisor-embedded architecture, its built-in read/write cache, and support for cutting-edge NVMe drives mounted directly on the PCIe bus.
• Fault Tolerance. Built-in resiliency handles drive, server, or component failures with continuous availability. Larger deployments can also be configured for chassis and rack fault tolerance. When hardware fails, just swap it out; the software heals itself, with no complicated management steps.
• Resource Efficiency. Erasure coding delivers up to 2.4x greater storage efficiency, with unique innovations like Local Reconstruction Codes and ReFS real-time tiers to extend these gains to hard disk drives and mixed hot/cold workloads, all while minimizing CPU consumption to give resources back to where they're needed most - the VMs.
• Manageability. Use Storage QoS Controls to keep overly busy VMs in check with minimum and maximum per-VM IOPS limits. The Health Service provides continuous built-in monitoring and alerting, and new APIs make it easy to collect rich, cluster-wide performance and capacity metrics.
• Scalability. Go up to 16 servers and over 400 drives, for multiple petabytes of storage per cluster. To scale out, simply add drives or add more servers; Storage Spaces Direct will automatically onboard new drives and begin using them. Storage efficiency and performance improve predictably at scale.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/storage/storage-spaces/storage-spaces-direct-overview

Windows 2016: Demo installs

• Hyper converged
• Converged

S2D user guide

Display storage pools and tiers

Display all known Storage pools and there health

Get-StoragePool S2D* | FT FriendlyName, FaultDomainAwarenessDefault, OperationalStatus, HealthStatus -autosize

Find out what storage tiers have been created with this command:

Get-StorageTier | FT FriendlyName, ResiliencySettingName, MediaType, PhysicalDiskRedundancy -autosize

Where to find the shared pool?

All the vols that you will create and the shared storage pool itself can be found on every server in the pool at:

C:\ClusterStorage\

So if you were to create volumes and name these "test1","test2"

C:\ClusterStorage\test1

C:\ClusterStorage\test2

Volumes

There are 3 types of volume you can create within the storage pool: Mirror, parity and multi resilient.

	Mirror	Parity	Multi-resilient
optimized for	Performance	Best use of disk	mix of the previous two
Use case	All data is hot	All data is cold	Mix of hot and cold
Storage efficiency	Least (33%)	Most (50+%)	Medium (~50%)
FS	NTFS or ReFS	NTFS or ReFS	ReFS
Minimum nodes	3	4	4

You can create volumes with different file systems in the same cluster. This is important since each file system supports a different feature set.

File systems in S2D vols

Further information can be found:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/storage/storage-spaces/plan-volumes