My Road to MCSA Series | 70-410 Edition, PT. 3 - Storage Virtualization

With just a little over two weeks in so far, I'm pretty confident that I understand most if not all of domain 1, Installing and Configuring. I wanted to check in and post a quick update on my progress.

For additional hands-on practice as I'm reading, I setup one of my lab machines to simulate Storage Pools and Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 R2.

To set up the lab, I first created six 5 GB VHDs on my lab host machine using computer management, numbered VHD1-6 to represent six physical disks that I would attach to my VirtualBox guest VM. Once the six drives were created, I opened the settings to my VirtualBox guest VM and added a SAS adapter. Windows Server 2012 R2 seemed to have no problems picking up on these new VHDs posing as physical disks.

Remote Desktop View of Storage Pool Available Physical Disks

From this point, I created my first Storage Space named "SVR-Lab2_Pool1" and added all available physical disks to the pool accepting defaults using the wizard. I now have a 25 GB Storage Space created from the Storage Pool consisting of the six physical drives. I was easily able to create virtual disks from here to quickly provision storage which I plan to use later for practice with file and folder permissions.

Just to toss in some PowerShell, I also used PowerShell ISE to create a Storage Pool using built in cmdlets.

One term that was used that initially tripped me up was primordial. At first I was having trouble understanding this term fully but found a really great explanation here. With the further explanation and visual aids, the easiest way for me to remember what primordial means is to think of JBOD (just a bunch of disks). Being a huge fan of virtualization anyways, this part of the lab excercise has been enjoyable and fairly easy once I understood it's use.

That's all I have for now and I'll continue to post more as I progress.