Windows Server 2022 includes a technology called Storage Spaces. Windows Server 2022 allows you to virtualize storage by grouping disks into storage pools. These storage pools can then be turned into virtual disks called storage spaces.
The Storage Spaces technology allows you to have a highly available, scalable, low-c ost, and flexible solution for both physical and virtual installations. Storage Spaces allows you to set up this advantage on either a single server or in scalable multinode mode. So, before going any further, let’s look at these two terms:
Storage Pools Storage pools are a group of physical disks that allows you to delegate administration, expand disk sizes, and group disks together.
Storage Spaces Storage Spaces allows you to take free space from storage pools and create virtual disks called storage spaces. Storage spaces give you the ability to have precise control, resiliency, and storage tiers.
Storage spaces and storage pools can be managed by an administrator through the use of the Windows Storage Management API, Server Manager, or Windows PowerShell.
One of the advantages of using the Storage Spaces technology is the ability to set up resiliency. There are three types of Storage Space resiliency: mirror, parity, and simple (no resiliency).
Fault tolerance (RAID) is discussed in detail in the “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” section.
Now that you understand what storage spaces and storage pools do, let’s take a look at some of the other advantages of using these features in Windows Server 2022:
Availability One advantage to the Storage Spaces technology is the ability to fully integrate the storage space with failover clustering. This advantage allows you to achieve service deployments that are continuously available. You have the ability to set up storage pools to be clustered across multiple nodes within a single cluster.
Tiered Storage The Storage Spaces technology allows virtual disks to be created with a two- tier storage setup. For data that is used often, you have an SSD tier; for data that is not used often, you use an HDD tier. The Storage Spaces technology will automatically transfer data at a subfile level between the two different tiers based on how often the data is used. Because of tiered storage, performance is greatly increased for data that is used most often, and data that is not used often still gets the advantage of being stored on a low- cost storage option.
Delegation One advantage of using storage pools is that you have the ability to control access by using access control lists (ACLs). What is nice about this advantage is that each storage pool can have its own unique access control lists. Storage pools are fully integrated with Active Directory Domain Services.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks
The ability to support drive sets and arrays using Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) technology is built into Windows Server 2022. RAID can be used to enhance data performance, or it can be used to provide fault tolerance to maintain data integrity in case of a hard disk failure. Windows Server 2022 supports three types of RAID technologies:
RAID- 0 (Disk Striping) Disk striping is using two or more volumes on independent disks created as a single striped set. There can be a maximum of 32 disks. In a striped set, data is divided into blocks that are distributed sequentially across all the drives in the set. With RAID-0 disk striping, you get very fast read and write performance because multiple blocks of data can be accessed from multiple drives simultaneously. However, RAID- 0 does not offer the ability to maintain data integrity during a single disk failure. In other words, RAID- 0 is not fault tolerant; a single disk event will cause the entire striped set to be lost, and it will have to be re- created through some type of recovery process, such as a tape backup.
RAID- 1 (Disk Mirroring) Disk mirroring is two logical volumes on two separate identical disks created as a duplicate disk set. Data is written on two disks at the same time; that way, in the event of a disk failure, data integrity is maintained and available. Although this fault tolerance gives administrators data redundancy, it comes with a price because it diminishes the amount of available storage space by half. For example, if you want to create a 300 GB mirrored set, you would have to install two 300 GB hard drives into the server, thus doubling the cost for the same available space.
RAID- 5 Volume (Disk Striping with Parity) With a RAID- 5 volume, you have the ability to use a minimum of three disks and a maximum of 32 disks. RAID-5 volumes allow data to be striped across all the disks with an additional block of error- correction called parity. Parity is used to reconstruct the data in the event of a disk failure. RAID- 5 has slower write performance than the other RAID types because the OS must calculate the parity information for each stripe that is written, but the read performance is equivalent to a stripe set, RAID- 0, because the parity information is not read. Like RAID- 1, RAID- 5 comes with additional cost considerations. For every RAID-5 set, roughly an entire hard disk is consumed for storing the parity information. For example, a minimum RAID- 5 set requires three hard disks, and if those disks are 300 GB each, approximately 600 GB of disk space is available to the OS and 300 GB is consumed by parity information, which equates to 33.3 percent of the available space. Similarly, in a five- disk RAID- 5 set of 300 GB disks, approximately 1,200 GB of disk space is available to the OS, which means that 20 percent of the total available space is consumed by the parity information. The words roughly and approximately are used when calculating disk space because a 300 GB disk will really be only about 279 GB of space. This is because vendors define a gigabyte as 1 billion bytes, but the OS defines it as 230 (1,073,741,824) bytes. Also, remember that filesystems and volume managers have overhead as well.
Software RAID is a nice option for a small company, but hardware RAID is definitely a better option if the money is available.
Table 3.6 breaks down the various aspects of the supported RAID types in Window Server 2022.
TABLE 3.6 Supported RAID- level properties in Windows Server 2022
RAID level | RAID type | Fault tolerant | Advantages | Minimum number of disks | Maximum number of disks |
0 | Disk striping | No | Fast reads and writes | 2 | 32 |
1 | Disk mirroring | Yes | Data redundancy and faster writes than RAID- 5 | 2 | 2 |
5 | Disk striping with parity | Yes | Data redundancy with less overhead and faster reads than RAID- 1 | 3 | 32 |
Creating RAID Sets
Now that you understand the concepts of RAID and how to use it, you can look at the creation of RAID sets in Windows Server 2022. The process of creating a RAID set is the same as the process for creating a simple or spanned volume set, except for the minimum disk requirements associated with each RAID type.
Creating a mirrored volume set is basically the same as creating a volume set except that you will select New Mirrored Volume. It is after the Select Disks page of the New Mirrored Volume Wizard appears that you’ll begin to see the difference. Since a new mirrored volume is being created, the volume requires two disks.
During the disk selection process, if only one disk is selected, the Next button will be unavailable because the disk minimum has not been met. Refer to Figure 3.30 to view the Select Disks page of the New Mirrored Volume Wizard during the creation of a new mirrored volume and notice that the Next button is not available.
FIGURE 3.30 Select Disks page of the New Mirrored Volume Wizard

To complete the process, you must select a second disk by highlighting the appropriate disk and adding it to the volume set. Once the second disk has been added, the Next button is available to complete the mirrored volume set creation.
A drive letter will have to be assigned, and the volume will need to be formatted. The new mirrored volume set will appear in Disk Management. In Figure 3.31, notice that the capacity of the volume equals one disk even though two disks have been selected.
FIGURE 3.31 Newly created mirrored volume set

To create a RAID- 5 volume set, you use the same process that you use to create a mirrored volume set. The only difference is that a RAID- 5 volume set requires that a minimum of three disks be selected to complete the volume creation. The process is simple: select New RAID- 5 Volume, select the three disks that will be used in the volume set, assign a drive letter, and format the volume.