Provision Storage Configuration with PowerShell-Part 2 of Using Storage Spaces Deployment Guide

ProvisionStorageConfiguration.ps1

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Storage-Spaces-Automated-3caf249a

After hardware validation, you can begin creating Storage Pools and Virtual disks from the disks. Run the ProvisionStorageConfiguration.ps1 script with:

PS>> .\ProvisionStorageConfiguration.ps1

PS>> .\ProvisionStorageConfiguration.ps1 -Automated

PS>> .\ProvisionStorageConfiguration.ps1 –PhysicalDisks <physical disk objects>

The first option is recommended and will add all of the SAS disks to the storage pool. If you want to use a different set of disks (ie. You want to exclude some disks from your configuration because they will not be clusterable), pass in a different set of disks via the command-line argument.

The –automated flag will create storage pools without any user input. The default configuration uses 2 physical disk redundancy and reserves 30% of the HDD tier capacity for backup workloads.

You can expect this script to take about 30 minutes to run for a 240 disk deployment.

During execution (if –automated is not used), the script will ask for 2 pieces of information from the user:

  • Desired physical disk redundancy
  • % capacity of the HDD storage to reserve for backup

The fraction of storage allocated for backup will be used to create parity storage spaces, while the rest will be allocated as mirrored spaces.

You should provide these numbers after carefully considering your final workload. To make this decision easier, you should use the Software-Defined Storage Design Calculator  . After you provide these numbers to the script, you will be presented with the calculated deployment. You will be given the option to cancel the operation so you can choose different parameters if you don’t think the proposed configuration will work for you.

Finishing up

When the script has finished running, all of the available physical drives passed in will have been added to storage pools, and each pool will have been carved up into several virtual disks.