Playing with Windows server 2012 Storage Spaces

[Chris Pollard]

So I installed Windows 2012 Eval on my spare HP N36L Microserver,  its has 2gb of ram and a 4 port SAS card so a total of 8 disks,  4x3.5" SATA and 4x2.5" SAS disks.  Performance seems pretty good considering its a Dual core AMD 1.4Ghz with so little RAM but I guess its not really doing much.  The Metro interface... seems pretty odd? Doesn't really make much difference to how I work, generally I just do Start.. Run for everything and that still works for me.  Everything server related including Storage Spaces can be found in the Server Manager console.

 

After the install I added the Data Deduplication role to have a play with and then setup 2 parity sets,  one with 3 sata disks and one with 4xSAS,  copying data to the parity sets gives similar speeds to what I get from unraid,  ie 25-30Mbps.  I didn't try RAID-5 or mirrored setups yet, not really interested in that.

 

The dedupe process seems to happen according to a schedule you set,  it says it will do it hourly but nothing seemed to happen until the scheduled task ran.  I copied mixed data to one of the parity sets and just media to the other one,  the mixed data managed to get a 2% dedupe saving, the pure media (mkv files) didn't get any, as would expect.  I think if you were using it for office documents or backups you could get great savings (obviously at a cost, if you lose a "popular" bit of data then that could toast lots of files).

 

The parity here works assuming all disks are the same size, so if you have 4 disks, 2x1TB and 2x2TB you will end up with 3TB of protected space. You can then setup another volume using the free space on the 2 larger disks giving you all of your space to play with, but in multiple volumes. Alternatively if you have a chunk of one disk spare you can just use that free space unprotected as a new volume.

 

I also tried pulling a disk and replacing it with a larger one,  this was easy. Just add a disk to the pool and hit repair on the virtual disk.  The process of rebuilding about 150gb of parity data took about 30 minutes... I think its file based parity since I expected this to take much longer. There was nothing in the UI to indicate a rebuild was taking place and by the time I managed to find the appropriate powershell command to show the status of the job (Get-StorageJob) it had finished.  I was then able to expand the Virtual Disk, and then the Volume.

 

I am yet to test trying to recover a parity set on a different install of 2012 server on different hardware... initial googling suggests this is possible but my past experience of doing this sort of thing in windows tells me I'll need luck more than judgement

 

For home use...  I'm not sure its worth the price tag,  you can get the Essentials edition for about £260 but I'm drawn to the concept of having smaller parity sets that I can expand easily,  I want a large system but having a 20:1 parity ratio is a bit crazy, in windows I could get to something more realistic like 5:1.  Dedupe is a nice bonus, and implemented in such a way that you don't need tons of ram... cough*ZFS*cough..  I need to play with the power saving settings, its no dice if all the disks have to be spun up all the time.

 

 

 

[garycase]

...  For home use...  I'm not sure its worth the price tag,  you can get the Essentials edition for about £260 ...

 

No need to get any version to "play" with Storage Spaces => it's included in Windows 8 

 

... while most folks probably don't have '8 at this point, any new computer likely will;  and for current systems an upgrade to '8 is far less expensive than Server 2012 

[b0ssman]

i tried the raid5 functionality and the write speed was terrible. something like 10 mb/sec.

 

that was on a i5 2500k with 8gb ram.

 

i now have 90mb/sec write speed to an encrypted zfs raidz pool.

[Chris Pollard]

...  For home use...  I'm not sure its worth the price tag,  you can get the Essentials edition for about £260 ...

 

No need to get any version to "play" with Storage Spaces => it's included in Windows 8 

 

... while most folks probably don't have '8 at this point, any new computer likely will;  and for current systems an upgrade to '8 is far less expensive than Server 2012 

 

Main thing I wanted to play with was actually deduplication which isn't included in Windows 8...  not that I even own Windows 8 yet so the Free Win2012 Eval seemed like a good bet to me.

 

You can hack in the functionality but doing that is liable to cause pain down the line if you do crazy stuff like patch your windows boxes...

[Chris Pollard]

i now have 90mb/sec write speed to an encrypted zfs raidz pool.

 

The box had Freenas with ZFS on it before,  ZFS is nice but I don't like having all my disks spun up 24/7, maybe you can spin them down but I couldn't find a way.

[garycase]

The DeDup is a nice feature => I definitely agree it's not a good idea to download the hack from the web ... you never know what may have been modified in the downloadable files.

 

If, however, you have a copy of Server 2012 and can extract the appropriate files from it (so you know they're definitely the valid Microsoft files), the feature works fine in Windows 8, although you have to use the command line invocation (the GUI isn't available).    But a couple of PowerShell scripts can easily do what you want.

 

Details are here for anyone wanting to "play" with the feature:  http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2013/04/18/windows-8-deduplication-awesome/

 

[b0ssman]

i now have 90mb/sec write speed to an encrypted zfs raidz pool.

 

The box had Freenas with ZFS on it before,  ZFS is nice but I don't like having all my disks spun up 24/7, maybe you can spin them down but I couldn't find a way.

 

use this script for freenas spindown on sas controllers

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?1053-Unsure-of-SATA-drive-spindown&p=29123&viewfull=1#post29123