I am planning to use Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 R2. I want to initially set up my sever with 1 hard drive in the storage pool. Is it possible later to add a second drive that mirrors the first hard drive? Or does this need to be done at the beginning?
2 Answers
You can add disks to the pool without problems, but it is the virtual disk you build on top of the pool that controls the "resiliency" setting.
So, you can do this:
- add a new Pool to Storage Spaces containing only one disk
- add a virtual disk using the pool you just created (its resiliency setting will be "simple" since you only have one disk in the pool)
- Add more disks to you existing pool
However, you can not increase the resiliency of your vdisk using the new disks. You basically have to add another vdisk and manually move data from the "simple" vdisk to the "resilient" one.
This seems to confirm it:
In case anyone arrives here from a search engine, it is possible to create a mirror vDisk with just a single backing device. The workaround:
- Create a new VHDX, dynamic, sized according to the disk you're planning to get (in case of a 4TB drive, I created a vhdx of 3.5TB)
- Mount the VHDX and initialize it as GPT on disk management
- Add the vhdx drive to the storage pool and create your mirrored vDisk
- Reboot to safe mode and delete the vhdx
Now when you reboot back to safe mode, the storage space will be in warning state, and the vhdx will appear as "Lost Communication", but otherwise the space will be fully functional.
To successfully remove the vhdx drive from the pool, you need to first add a real disk and wait for data sync (use Get-StorageJob cmdlet to watch progress)
