Storage Spaces can be deployed together with the Failover
Clustering feature of Windows Server 2012. Such a scenario can be
used to deliver continuously available shared storage for your
environment by allowing shared storage to transparently fail over to
a different node in a clustered file server when necessary. You can
also integrate Storage Spaces with CSVs to implement a Scale-Out
File Server that incorporates the benefits of using Storage
Spaces.
You should keep the following considerations in mind when
deploying Storage Spaces together with Failover Clustering:
-
You need a minimum of three physical disks.
-
Physical disks must be SAS, not SATA.
-
Physical disks must support persistent
reservations.
-
Physical disks must pass the failover cluster validation
tests.
-
Only fixed provisioning can be used, not thin
provisioning.
After Storage Spaces has been implemented in your environment,
you can manage it in the following ways:
For smaller deployments, Server Manager offers a simple way of
managing storage pools, virtual disks, volumes, and shares. For
larger deployments—for example, when Storage Spaces is used for
Hyper-V shared storage in a datacenter or cloud environment—Windows
PowerShell provides a way to automate management tasks using
scripts.
Note
Storage Spaces and WMI
You can also use WMI directly to manage Storage Spaces using
SMAPI—for example, by writing a utility that does this.
The scalability of Storage Spaces enables it to be used in
various scenarios, ranging from deploying file servers for small
businesses to implementing a private-cloud solution for a midsized
organization. For example, a single standalone file server using
Storage Spaces with a dozen connected physical disks might be used
for any of the following purposes:
-
A general-purpose file server for a small business or
department
-
An archival storage solution for infrequently accessed
documents or media files
-
Virtual machine storage for a Hyper-V host used for test
or development
As a second example, you can combine Storage Spaces with
Failover Clustering to deploy a highly available, two-node,
clustered file server that you can use to provide shared storage for
virtual machines running on clustered Hyper-V hosts in your
production environment. Such a scenario is possible because the
Windows Server 2012 version of Hyper-V supports a new
host-clustering option of using Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0
shares for storing your virtual machine files. The file server in
this scenario could conceivably scale up to using several hundred
disks deployed in rack-mounted SATA or SAS enclosures, and you could
use such a file server as the storage for your organization’s
private-cloud solution.
Note
Scaling beyond
Storage Spaces
If your organization’s storage requirements are very large,
you can implement Windows Server 2012 file server clusters that
use Fibre Channel for shared storage to take advantage of advanced
storage-networking features such as SMB Scale-Out and SMB Direct.
Such an infrastructure could be used to provide shared storage for
dozens, or even hundreds, of Hyper-V host clusters. If you use
Fibre Channel for connectivity between the storage array and the
file-server clusters, you should also use 10 gigabyte Ethernet
(GbE) or InfiniBand for connectivity between the Hyper-V host
clusters and the file-server clusters to ensure optimal
performance.
