My travels have taken me around the globe and back. My goal: to track down
some of the world's most experienced IT guides. These are My adventures in IT.
While traveling, my philosophy is to use lightweight but durable luggage
with just enough room for the essentials. Only pack you really need.
That way, you are not wasting storage space and energy, lugging around things that you
won't end up using, but in the server closet, this Spartan approach to storage
is unattainable.
Or is it? I caught up with globetrotting traveler IT service provider
Huy Tran who exposed the secrets of keeping storage simple while ensuring
you won't feel you have left anything behind. So you have helped plenty of IT pros
to set up their storage. What are some of the common mistakes or misconceptions that
people have and what are some of the SMB Storage must haves? So what I tell
people is there is no secret sauce. There is no complexity to it.
The idea is to keep it simple. If we keep it simple, it's easier for us to set up
and is easier for us to troubleshoot. And what are you going to show us today?
Today I am going to show you a simple build on setting up a Windows storage pool.
We are going to use Windows Server 2016. We will set up the storage pool and
we will set up a file share as well, too. The solution is a very common solution,
but it may not be best for every single use case. Do your homework and figure out
the best one for you, but hopefully this should cover it. How is setting up
and handling storage day-to-day better or easier through HPE and Microsoft
Solutions? HPE did a really good job coming up with their own line
of storage servers. The HPE MicroServer Gen10 was a really good job. It makes
life really easy. You take that hardware and then you combine it with
Microsoft’s software operating system. I mean, you get the best of both worlds there.
For a small business owner, it couldn’t get any simpler for them.
When they buy the system, they are just ready to go, ready to start configuring
when they turn on the power button. Why should we have a centralized storage
location? The reason why is because your users may have their files saved
locally on their desktop, on their laptop, and at that point, in order for
them to share, you are sharing through emails and you are sharing through
attachments. Imagine the really big headache that that can build up.
So what we want to do is take that burden off of them. If we can centralize
the storage management a bit, it makes life easier for the business owner, overall.
I assume that this is good because it takes the responsibility
out of the user's hands when it comes to backing up. Exactly. Now we are putting
the responsibility back into the IT pros’ hands where we now have the ability
to manage that process for them, and they don't have to think about it. They just
get back on with their workflow as if nothing ever happened and they were
just sharing documents. Okay, so how do we get started? What I have here is
a Windows Server 2016 setup, and what we are going to do first is we are going
to go into Storage Manager and from Storage Manager we will click on File
storage and services. And from there, this is where we set everything up.
Storage pool is the option. And here is where we actually begin the process of creating
the storage pool.
So I will click on Create a storage pool and we will go into the welcome screen.
We are going to keep everything basic and keep everything default.
As simple as possible. Less complexity, right? So we will hit Next. Then we will
name the Storage pool. Let's just say POOL 1.
We will hit Next. And here, I have set up four hard drives. We now can allocate
how we want these four hard drives to play with the system. Instead of
allocating all four to be used as one, I am going to say I want three of them
to be used as one. But then the fourth one, I want that to be used as a hot spare. In case
one of the three happens to go kaput, the hot spare would kick in. Okay,
We will hit Next, we will go through the confirmation. This all looks good.
I am going to hit Create, and this is going through the process of creating
a storage pool. So once we create the storage pool, we need to create
the virtual disk. And the virtual disk is where we will select the storage pool
that we just created, we will hit Next in this welcome screen here, we will call
this virtual
disk 1.
We will
keep everything basic and simple. Here is where we have the option of
how do you want to set up this virtual disk? This is the RAID option.
RAID is where we can take those hard drives that we just allocated into the storage
pool and tell it to where we can stripe the data, which is basically use every
single bit of those hard drives to save data into. Or we can do a mirror drive
for we can tell the system to copy one file or folder for one hard drive
to the other hard drive, essentially creating a mirror where, in case one of the hard
drive goes down, we have other backups. And then we still have that one hot
spare that we set up earlier as well too, as a another former backup and then,
lastly, parity, which is kind of the best of both worlds between
our simple RAID and our mirror RAID.
We will go with the parity here, so it is going to give us that backup slash
the speed of the read and write between the hard drives. In the provisioning type,
we can choose either thin or fixed. We will keep it simple, we will just select
fixed.
And here is where we can specify how big we want the drives to be. So again,
keeping everything straightforward and simple. We will just say: Hey, I want to
use the max volume of all 36 gigs.
Next. Then we will hit our confirmation page, we will just review everything here
and then we will hit Create. Now, the last step in setting up this storage
pool is to add the pool we just created to the server.
So what we are going to do is we are going to create a volume.
I am going to hit Close here. It is going to take me to the volume wizard. I am going to hit Next.
Keep everything the same and simple. We are going to allocate the whole
entire size to it. And then we are going to assign a drive letter. In this case
we will call our drive E.
Next from there, we will keep everything the same here. NTFS file system and
we will name this. We will call this Pool one, because we created the storage
pool one.
Next. Create. Now this is running the final stages of it, and this is how
we set up a storage pool. The next step we are going to do is set up the share.
We created our service pool and the folder. Now we are actually going to share it
so that users can use it. We are going to click on Share.
Then we are going to go to Tasks and Create a new share.
We have different options here, but we are going to keep things simple again.
We are going to do an SMB share quick. Leave first option. We will hit Next. And then
we will select the pool one, the storage pool we just created earlier, the E drive
that we mapped it to. We will hit Next and we will call this Team share.
Next again. Here's where we will start to adjust our permission settings.
The first thing we want to enable is Enable access based enumeration. Basically
what this states is, if you don't have access to this folder because
the permission denied it, then you don't have access to see it. So let's make
sure that security is in place as well, too. It's important.
We will hit Next and here we can actually begin putting in our permission settings.
We can definitely go through and customized permission and add to it
as well. But for right now I am going to keep things simple and just keep it basic.
So we will hit Next again. We will go to create and this is it.
This is how you set up a share. How much storage is needed? That's a good
question. And that usually all depends on your business. My typical rule of thumb
is when you are sharing data, I usually take whatever space my users
have on their desktop, and I just add it all together. It may be overkill,
but more space is better than no space at all. I know security is important.
So where does it fit in the setup stage?
Right before you are about to make the share. So we just got done building
the storage pool and we set up the share. Now what we want to do is
go back into our server and let's go into that share that we just set up.
So there goes my Pool one and then there goes that share file we just set up.
So I am going to right-click on it. I will hit Properties and then I will click on Security.
And here's where we can edit our security and permissions so we can say:
so-and-so has access to which folders or which files. That's the idea,
to lock this down so that only certain people have access to it, maybe instead
of everybody.
All right, we have learned a lot. What is the last phase in setting up your
storage server? The last phase is the document management phase. How do you
want to use your shared folder? How do you want to set the different
permissions? And that really all depends on the business. So some tips
that I would have is you can do a personal share. Or you could have,
let's just say, for example, a Jane Doe and a John Doe. And Jane Doe and John Doe
could set their permissions to only be shared with maybe certain people, or maybe
a certain group. Or you can do a rule base or a role base, where we can say
a group such as Finance, or Accounting,
everyone who was part of that group can set their own shares there. That seemed
a little too easy, but what do we miss anything? Are we done? No. We kept it simple.
We kept it not complex. We set up the storage pool, we set up the file
share and then we went into permission settings. At this point, it's up to
the business to manage it. So we are all done here. That's it. Just
straightforward and simple.
Thanks for watching. I hope you will join us on our next adventure,
where we create a multi layered security plan.