Windows Server 2012 Storage: Windows Gets a Bit SANer Presented by Mark on twitter 1 V2.00. contents copyright 2013 Mark Minasi. Copying and redistribution is strictly forbidden. Thank you for respecting our copyrights.

What this is all about

Main Topics 3

4K Native Support 4

Answer: Advanced Format Drives 5

Which Do You Have? 6 More info at KB

ISO and VHD Mount Support 7

Why SANs and "Shared Storage" Matter 8

Windows Clusters Basic Prototype 9 shared storage Two or more SQL, Hyper-V, file etc. servers attached to the shared storage acting as "nodes" in the "cluster" SQL databases, virtual machine disks (VHDs), DHCP scopes, regular old files, etc Shared storage allowing both systems to do block I/O on the same sectors… iSCSI One of the servers actually reads/writes the shared storage and is the "active" node; the others just wait for the active one to die, and they're the "passive" nodes. In a few special cases, all nodes are simultaneously active; need R2 or 2012 for that

"Shared Storage" 10

How We Did Shared Storage 11

What a SAN Does 12 Take a bunch of actual disks… Clump them together into what now looks like a single big pool of storage…

What a SAN Does 13 And SANs then let us carve out pieces of the pool called "LUNs" which look like actual physical hard drives… Each of which is available to a server that understands how to speak the iSCSI protocol, which lets us talk SCSI over TCP/IP. The server thinks it's a physical hard disk that it's talking to.

Why Bother? 14

More and Cheaper Options in SANs 15

What Storage Spaces Does 16 Take a bunch of actual disks… Create a "Storage Pool"

Storage Spaces then lets us carve out pieces of the pool called “virtual disks“ And Server 2012 includes the software to act as an iSCSI server (a "target") or a client (an "initiator")

Build a SAN With Windows Server 18

19 physical disk Storage Pool Virtual disks / LUNs Volume(s) SMB File Shares NFS File Shares iSCSI virtual disks/LUN s This is the hierarchy, which is why the GUI order is so odd… Volum e

I'm Sure This Makes Sense, Somehow 20

Data Deduping: Some Details 21

Summary: Why 2012's SAN Exists 22

SMB Grows Up: SMB

One More Cluster Point 24

Control Data Access Better 25

CHKDSK Rebooted 26

More on Dismounting 27

How a “Pre-Boot CHKDSK” Works 28

CHKDSK and Dismounts 29

CHKDSK 30

New CHKDSK: /Scan, $Corrupt… 31

CHKDSK 32

Bottom Line 33

Thank You! 34