Windows Server 2012 Storage Pool

zer0gravity

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 8, 2008
Messages
1,129
Hello [H]ard!

I just setup a dev desktop with 8x2tb drives running server 2012 storage pool. I mostly wanted to try out the OS for work uses (server 2008) is getting old and I'm sure we will all be on 2012 if we like it or not.

I came from flexraid to server 2012 and have to say that so far I like it. Anyone else have any input on their experiences with server 2012 and any raids/pools they have running.

Let me know what you guys think of it!
 
We have been evaluating Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 betas (and now RC) for a while on a few different boxes and it has been less than spectacular. SES support is still broken, randomly lighting failure LEDS on arrays so often they look like Christmas lights. Cluster failover also isn't working well, with corruption issues happening more often than I would like. That said, performance has been improving with each release and stability has increased so I have high hopes MS will get it together.
 
We have been evaluating Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 betas (and now RC) for a while on a few different boxes and it has been less than spectacular. SES support is still broken, randomly lighting failure LEDS on arrays so often they look like Christmas lights. Cluster failover also isn't working well, with corruption issues happening more often than I would like. That said, performance has been improving with each release and stability has increased so I have high hopes MS will get it together.

Have you also been evaluating the new file system (ReFS)? The new resiliency features look very intriguing, especially in concert with Storages Spaces, but I haven't gotten my act together enough to play around with it at home.
 
Have you also been evaluating the new file system (ReFS)? The new resiliency features look very intriguing, especially in concert with Storages Spaces, but I haven't gotten my act together enough to play around with it at home.

We have tested both NTFS and ReFS. ReFS isn't the magical panacea some are hoping it will be. White it does have metadata checksums, it cannot correct everything and we have had to go to backups for corrupted files or filesystems. It does though let you keep the FS up while you delete and restore the corruptions and not have to take it down.
 
From what I saw, write speeds were piss poor and there is not option to set the number of parity drives. Without fixing those two things, I can't see it catching on, maybe in the consumer market for a couple of drives.
 
I'm currently working on splitting up the pool created by Stablebit Drive Pool on WHS 2011 because apparently there's a huge issue where Blu-ray would freeze for 10 seconds every 5 minutes and fast-forward to where it should be. What a clusterfuck - since my movie formats are still in Video_TS and BDMV folder format, the files are all over the place amount (6) 2TB drives.

I had to painstakingly pull one drive off the pool, populate it with movies from within the pool, pull another drive off, populate that, pull another, and so on. Over 4TB worth movies.

I suspect that the cause of the freeze is because Drive Pool threw data from the same movies to all or some of the 6 drives, so each drives would have to spin up when a VOB or MT2S files complete and searches for the next one.

I wonder if Windows Storage Server 2012's drive pooling will suffer the same issue. I'm even wary about trying ZFS's zpool for the same reason.
 
Azhar, your post makes me wary of any drive pooling system. I've never heard of such problems with WHS2011, Drive Pool, or ZFS.
 
I wonder if Windows Storage Server 2012's drive pooling will suffer the same issue. I'm even wary about trying ZFS's zpool for the same reason.

There is a large difference between the stability, performance and reliability of a minor third party addon and the upcoming preeminent FS and storage topology of WS 2012 (or ZFS for that matter). Given the proper hardware, don't let the failings of the former taint you against the latter.
 
I've been thinking for the past 3-4 days about my WHS issue and it occurred to me this morning that the issue might be related to Drive Pool scattering files on multiple drives. It makes sense. All of my movies are in their original Video_TS and BDMV folder format and when adding the drives and files into the pool, Drive Pool scattered them.

When a chapter (VOB and MT2S) ends and the next automatically begins, it's probably looking for it on another drive - waking it up, spinning it up, searching, fetching, and then playing.

I'm going to see if I can confirm this by creating an ISO of one movie so it stays on a single drive and see if it freezes.
 
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