William Stanek - Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage, Security, & Networking Pocket Consultant

■ Keep in mind the storage pool might have one or more disks allocated as hot spares. hot spares are made available automatically to recover from disk failure when you use mirroring or parity volumes-and cannot otherwise be used. To force Windows to use a hot spare, you can remove the hot spare from the storage pool by pressing and holding or right-clicking it and selecting Remove, and then adding the drive back to the storage pool as an automatically allocated disk by pressing and holding or right-clicking the storage pool and selecting Add Physical Drive. Unfortunately, doing so might cause a storage pool created with a hot spare to report that it is in an Unhealthy state. If you subsequently try to add the drive again in any capacity, you’ll get an error stating “Error adding task: The storage pool could not complete the operation because its configuration is read-only.” The storage pool is not, in fact, in a read-only state. If the storage pool were in a read-only state you could enter the following command at an elevated Windows PowerShell prompt to clear this state:

Get-Storagepool "PoolName" | Set-Storagepool -IsReadonly $false

■ However, entering this command likely will not resolve the problem. To clear this error, I needed to reset Storage Spaces and the related subsystem. You might find it easier to simply restart the server. After you reset or restart the server, the storage pool will transition from an error state (where a red circle with an ‘x’ is showing) to a warning state (where a yellow triangle with an ‘!’ is showing). You can then remove the physical disk from the storage pool by pressing and holding or right-clicking it and selecting Remove. Afterward, you will be able to add the physical disk as an automatically-allocated disk by pressing and holding or right-clicking the storage pool and selecting Add Physical Drive.

6.On the Specify The Provisioning Type page, select the provisioning type. Storage can be provisioned in a thin disk or a fixed disk. With thin-disk provisioning, the volume uses space from the storage pool as needed, up to the volume size. With fixed provisioning, the volume has a fixed size and uses space from the storage pool equal to the volume size. Click Next.

7.On the Specify The Size Of The Virtual Disk page, use the options provided to set the size of the virtual disk. With fixed provisioning, selecting Maximum Size ensures that the disk is created and sized with the maximum space possible given the available space. For example, if you use a 2-TB disk and a 1.5-TB disk with a mirrored layout, a 1.5-TB fixed disk will be created because this is the maximum mirrored size possible.

8.When you are ready to continue, click Next. After you confirm your selections, click Create. The wizard tracks the progress of the disk creation. When the wizard finishes creating the disk, the View Results page will be updated to reflect this. Review the details to ensure that all phases were completed successfully. If any portion of the configuration failed, note the reason for the failure and take corrective actions as appropriate before repeating this procedure.

9.When you click Close, the New Volume Wizard should start automatically. Use the wizard to create a volume on the disk as discussed in the following section.

Standard volumes can be created on any physical or virtual disk available. You use the same technique regardless of how the disk is presented to the server. This allows you to create standard volumes on a server’s internal disks, on virtual disks in a storage subsystem available to a server, and on virtual iSCSI disks available to a server.

If you add the data deduplication feature to a server, you can enable data deduplication for standard volumes created for that server.

You can create a standard volume by completing the following steps:

1.Start the New Volume Wizard. If you just created a storage space, the New Volume Wizard might start automatically. If it did not, do one of the following:

■On the Disks subnode, all available disks are listed in the Disks panel. Select the disk with which you want to work, and then under Tasks, select New Volume.

■On the Storage Pools subnode, all available virtual disks are listed in the Virtual Disks panel. Select the disk with which you want to work, and then under Tasks, select New Volume.

2.On the Select The Server And Disk page, select the server for which you are provisioning storage, select the disk where the volume should be created, and then click Next. If you just created a storage space and then New Volume Wizard started automatically, the related server and disk are selected automatically and you simply need to click Next.

3.On the Specify The Size Of The Volume page, use the options provided to set the volume size. By default, the volume size is set to the maximum available on the related disk. Click Next.

4.On the Assign To A Drive Letter Or Folder page, specify whether you want to assign a drive letter or path to the volume, and then click Next. You use these options as follows:

■ Drive LetterTo assign a drive letter, choose this option, and then select an available drive letter in the list provided.

■ The Following FolderTo assign a drive path, choose this option, and then enter the path to an existing folder on an NTFS drive, or select Browse to search for or create a folder.

■ Don’t Assign To A Drive Letter Or Drive PathTo create the volume without assigning a drive letter or path, choose this option. You can assign a drive letter or path later if necessary.

5.On the Select File System Settings page, specify how the volume should be formatted by using the following options:

■ File SystemSets the file system type, such as NTFS or ReFS.

■ Allocation Unit SizeSets the cluster size for the file system. This is the basic unit in which disk space is allocated. The default allocation unit size is based on the volume’s size and is set dynamically prior to formatting. To override this feature, you can set the allocation unit size to a specific value.

■ Volume LabelSets a text label for the partition. This label is the partition’s volume name.

6.If you elected to create an NTFS volume and added data deduplication to the server, you can enable and configure data deduplication. When you are ready to continue, click Next.

7.After you confirm your selections, click Create. The wizard tracks the progress of the volume creation. When the wizard finishes creating the volume, the View Results page will be updated to reflect this. Review the details to ensure that all phases were completed successfully. If any portion of the configuration failed, note the reason for the failure and take corrective actions as appropriate before repeating this procedure.

8.Click Close.

REAL WORLD In the Registry under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem, the NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate and RefsDisableLastAccessUpdate values control whether NTFS and ReFS update the last-access time stamp on each directory when it lists directories on a volume. If you notice that a busy server with a large number of directories isn’t very responsive when you list directories, this could be because the filesystem log buffer in physical memory is getting filled with time stamp update records. To prevent this, you can set the value to 1. When the value is set to 1, the filesystem does not update the last-access time stamp, and it does not record time stamp updates in the file system log. Otherwise, when the value is set to 0 (the default), the filesystem updates the last-access time stamp on each directory it detects, and it records each time change in the filesystem log.