Planning volumes in Storage Spaces Direct

Planning volumes in Storage Spaces Direct

1. Choosing how many volumes to create

   1. recommend making the number of volumes a multiple of the number of servers in your cluster, one server handles metadata orchestration for each volume
   2. one volume per host

2. Choosing the filesystem

   1. the new Resilient File System (ReFS) for Storage Spaces Direct.
   2. If your workload requires a feature that ReFS doesn’t support yet, you can use NTFS instead.

3. Choosing the resiliency type

   1. With two servers

      1. The only option for clusters with two servers is two-way mirroring

   2. With three servers

      1. With three servers, you should use three-way mirroring for better fault tolerance and performance.

   3. With four or more servers

      1. With four or more servers, you can choose for each volume whether to use three-way mirroring, dual parity (often called “erasure coding”), or mix the two.

4. When performance matters most

   1. Should run on volumes that use mirroring to maximize performance.

5. When capacity matters most

   1. Should run on volumes that use dual parity to maximize storage efficiency.

6. When data is written in bulk

   1. one volume can mix mirroring and dual parity.

7. Choosing the size of volumes

   1. Footprint

      1. usable capacity, the amount of data it can store

   2. Reserve capacity

      1. volumes space to repair “in-place” after drives fail, improving data safety and performance.
      2. recommend reserving the equivalent of one capacity drive per server, up to 4 drives