Diagnostico Organizacional

You can manage virtual hard disks within

Windows Server 2016 in much the same way that you can manage physical disks. For example, you can create and attach a virtual hard disk and use it for storing data. The virtual hard disk appears as another drive letter in the disk or folder

management tools.

Virtual hard disks are files that represent a traditional hard disk drive. Typically, in Hyper-V, you use virtual hard disks as the operating system disk and storage disks for virtual machines. In Windows Server 2016, you can access the same

virtual hard disks from within the operating system. The virtual hard disks have the following characteristics:

• In Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you can only work with .vhd files.

• In Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, or Windows Server 2012 or later, you also can create and manage .vhdx files, which enable much larger disk sizes and provide other benefits.

• You can create and attach virtual hard disks by using disk management tools such as Disk Management and Diskpart.exe. After creating and attaching the virtual hard disk, you can create volumes on the drive and format the partition. Additionally, in Windows 8 or newer versions, and Windows Server 2012 or newer versions, you can mount virtual hard disks in File Explorer.

• You can configure Windows Server 2016 to start from a virtual hard disk using the native virtual hard disk boot feature. This feature enables you to configure multiple operating systems on a single computer and choose which operating system to use when you start the computer.

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Installation, Storage, and Compute with Windows Server 2016 2-9

• You can attach virtual hard disks that you create by using Hyper-V, or that you create on another computer. For example, if you create a virtual hard disk in Hyper-V, you can copy that virtual hard disk to another computer, and then use the native virtual hard disk boot feature to start the computer using the virtual disk that you created in Hyper-V.

• You can use virtual hard disks as a deployment technology. For example, you can use Hyper-V to create a standard image for desktop or server computers, and then distribute the image to other computers.

You can use Windows PowerShell to create and manage virtual hard disks in Windows Server 2016. You must first have the Windows PowerShell Hyper-module installed. Then, you can use the following commands and cmdlets to create and manage virtual hard disks:

• New-vhd. Use this cmdlet to create virtual hard disk files. When you specify the path, using the extension .vhd or .vhdx defines the virtual hard disk file type. For example, the following cmdlet creates a new dynamically resizing .vhd file of 10 GB in size.

New-VHD -Path c:\sales.vhd -Dynamic -SizeBytes 10Gb

• Mount-VHD. Use this command to mount the virtual hard disk to create volumes and format files systems.

• Initialize-disk. Use this command to initialize the disk in preparation for creating volumes.

• Get-vhd. Use this command to retrieve information about a named .vhd file.

• Set-vhd. Use this cmdlet to configure the .vhd file properties. For example, the following cmdlet changes the physical sector size of the Sales.vhdx file.

Set-VHD –Path c:\Sales.vhdx –PhysicalSectorSizeBytes 4096

• Convert-vhd. You can use the Convert-vhd cmdlet to change from a VHD to a VHDX file format.

One of the benefits of using Windows PowerShell is the ability to script cmdlets, or to link them by using the pipe (|) operator. This can enable you to perform several tasks in one step. The following command will create a new virtual hard disk of type .vhd, and assign it a dynamic size of 10 GB. The .vhd is then mounted, and partitions and volumes created and formatted.

New-VHD -Path c:\sales.vhd -Dynamic -SizeBytes 10Gb | Mount-VHD -Passthru |Initialize-Disk -Passthru |New-Partition -AssignDriveLetter -UseMaximumSize |Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -Confirm:$false -Force

Selecting a disk type

There are various types of disks available that you can use to provide storage to server and client systems.

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2-10 Configuring local storage

The speed of disks is measured in input/output per second (IOPS). The most common types of disks are:

• Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE). EIDE is based on standards that were created in 1986.

The integrated drive electronics (IDE) interface supports both the Advanced Technology Attachment 2 (ATA-2) and Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI) standards. Enhanced refers to the ATA-2 (Fast ATA) standard.

Due to the addressing standards of this technology, there is a 128 GB limitation on storage using EIDE. In addition, the speed of an EIDE drive is limited to a maximum of 133 megabytes (MB) per second (MBps). EIDE drives are seldom used today.

• Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA). Introduced in 2003, SATA is a computer bus interface, or channel, for connecting the motherboard or device adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives. SATA was designed to replace EIDE. It can use the same low-level commands as EIDE, but SATA host adapters and devices communicate by using a high-speed serial cable over two pairs of conductors. SATA can operate at high-speeds of 1.5, 3.0, and 6.0 GB per second, depending on the SATA revision (1, 2, or 3 respectively).

SATA disks are generally low-cost disks that provide mass storage. Because SATA drives are less expensive than other drive options (but also provide reduced performance), organizations might choose to deploy SATA drives when they require large amounts of storage but not high performance.

SATA disks are also less reliable compared to serial attached SCSI (SAS) disks. A variation on the SATA interface is eSATA, which is designed to enable high-speed access to externally attached SATA drives.

• Small computer system interface (SCSI). SCSI is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. SCSI was originally introduced in 1978 and became a standard in 1986. Similar to EIDE, SCSI was designed to run over parallel cables;

however, recently the usage has been expanded to run over other mediums. The 1986 parallel specification of SCSI had initial speed transfers of 5 MBps. The more recent 2003 implementation, Ultra 640 SCSI (also known as Ultra 5), can transfer data at speeds of 640 MBps. SCSI disks provide higher performance than SATA disks, but are also more expensive.

• SAS. SAS is a further implementation of the SCSI standard. SAS depends on a point-to-point serial protocol that replaces the parallel SCSI bus technology, and uses the standard SCSI command set. SAS offers backward-compatibility with second-generation SATA drives. SAS drives are reliable and made for 24 hours a day, seven days a week (24/7) operation in data centers. With up to 15,000 rotations per minute, these disks are also the fastest traditional hard disks.

• Solid-state drives (SSDs). SSDs are data storage devices that use solid-state memory to store data rather than using the spinning disks and movable read/write heads that are used in other disks. SSDs use microchips to store the data and do not contain any moving parts. SSDs provide fast disk access, use less power, and are less susceptible to failure when dropped than traditional hard disks such as SAS drives. However, they also are much more expensive per GB of storage. SSDs typically use a SATA interface, so you typically can replace hard disk drives with SSDs without any modifications.

Note: Fibre Channel, FireWire, or USB-attached disks are also available storage options.

They define either the transport bus or the disk type. For example, USB-attached disks are used mostly with SATA or SSD drives to store data.

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Installation, Storage, and Compute with Windows Server 2016 2-11

Question: What disk types are you most commonly using in your organization, and do you have a management and provisioning strategy for storage usage in particular scenarios?

Verify the correctness of the statement by placing a mark in the column to the right.

Statement Answer

ReFS supports data deduplication in Windows Server 2016.

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2-12 Configuring local storage

Lesson 2