hi I'm cosmos Darwin I'm a program manager on the high availability and
storage team at Microsoft let's take a look at storage spaces direct one of the
exciting new features coming in Windows Server 2016 space is direct is
software-defined shared-nothing storage that's a mouthful so let's look at a
demo to see what this means we're going to start with just three industry
standard servers with internal drives I want to emphasize that there is no
shared storage here there are no fancy cables it's just Ethernet connecting
three servers and if I remote desktop into one of those machines I can
actually enumerate the physical disks in that machine and see that there are six
of them the four hard drives and two flash devices that's it just local
drives first let's make a cluster out of these three servers this will allow them
to work together to provide things like high availability we'll run the new
cluster command listing off those three nodes and you'll see it just takes a
moment to run it will form the cluster and there we have our cluster called
demo and if we enumerate the nodes in this cluster you'll see that there are
three of them there they are one two three great this is where the magic
really starts storage space is direct is going to take the internal drives from
these servers and create a software-defined pool of storage that is
accessible to all of the machines this pool will have cache tears resiliency
erase your coding across columns all the things you would expect out of a
high-end storage solution configured automatically to do this we're going to
run the enable cluster storage spaces direct command this can take a short
time to run we'll click yes and let it go
and just like that we've enabled storage spaces direct and if we take a look at
the storage pool we now see all of the drives from all three nodes and now
we're ready to create volumes into which we can put whatever data we want to do
that we'll run the new volume command here I'll run it in a loop just to
create a bunch of them you'll see how quickly this goes so there I've created
one two volumes there's a third one now something to note here is that these
volumes are running the cluster shared volume file system this means that the
volumes will look to each node like they're mounted locally more than that
these volumes have another interesting property they have built-in fault
tolerance so that if drives fail or even if an entire node goes offline all data
stays online and accessible this means storage spaces direct works great as a
scale out file server or in a hyper-converged configuration where
virtual machines sit directly on top of the volumes and if we need to scale out
all we have to do is add another node to the cluster we can do that by running
the add cluster node command the node will take a moment to join and then we
can run the get cluster node command to see that indeed we now have a fourth
node in our cluster and if we go very quickly we can enumerate the physical
disks which are not yet in a pool and see the drives that are in this node we
just added however over time without any additional steps storage spaces direct
will absorb those new drives and redistribute the volumes to take maximum
advantage of all of the available storage and this entire process of
starting with just regular servers creating a cluster forming a pool of
software-defined shared storage creating volumes and then scaling out took less
than 15 minutes of real-world time but spaces Direct isn't just easy to deploy
it's also fantastically performant the storage pool will automatically use the
fastest media present to provide a built-in and always-on cache for example
here I am on a different four node it's still just four nodes but it's a
little larger it's got a few more devices we can see here there are the
four nodes and in each node I have four nvme SSDs and then a bunch of rotational
spinning hard drive disks this is not an all flash cluster I'm using an open
source tool called VM fleet to deploy no fewer than 80 virtual machines onto
these four nodes and those VMs running Full Tilt are getting over 1 million I
ops from these four nodes that are not even all flash that's not bad for a
feature that is included at no additional cost in Windows Server 2016
to learn more about spaces direct checkout AKMs slash spaces direct thanks
for watching