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DrCheese
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Storage Spaces & REFS

Post by DrCheese »

Hi hi,

At present we have a single veeam server running Windows 2016 & 6 x 6TB drives in Raid 5. This gives us a 30TB Repo which we current use with Dedupe. We run a weekly active full which comes to around 5.4TB & Backups are moved to tape each week using the GFS feature. I get around 80% savings from the DeDupe alone, which is crazy!

However, given that Dedupe has caused me headaches before on other servers with corruption & the recent 2016 Bug that could have caused us to lose the repro (Thankfully we weren't affected!), along side the slow speed when recovering from a Deduped volume - I'm looking at moving over to something more resiliant. I know the RAID 5 I have at present isn't really the best, as the loss of a single disk puts me at risk & rebuild times are over 24 hours.

As I understand it, A storage space setup with REFS allows for auto healing of corrupted data, but you need to set the disks up in a mirror or parity format to do this. Does this mean I unraid all the disks & create the "array" from within Windows instead? If so, is this a supported solution on a single server & will disk performance struggle? Or should I simply recreate the Array in Raid 50 & a single REFS formated volume, which loses the corruption autorepair?
lando_uk
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Re: Storage Spaces & REFS

Post by lando_uk »

Avoid parity, as it's dreadfully slow. Your Raid controller needs to be able to support passthrough mode for Storage Spaces sees the raw disks, or if not you can setup 6 x RAID0 vdisks. If that doesn't work well, your backups can fit on a RAID10 with ReFS, so I'd use that rather than RAID50. It wont auto-repair, but if a corruption occurs, it'll trigger a windows event that you can monitor and you can run a full backup if it pops up.
mkretzer
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Re: Storage Spaces & REFS

Post by mkretzer »

RAID controller behind Storage Spaces? Is that supported now? With 2012 R2 it was not supported at all to have a RAID controller at all between storage spaces and the disk...

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... quirements
"Not Supported: RAID HBA controllers or SAN (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FCoE) devices"
Gostev
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Re: Storage Spaces & REFS

Post by Gostev »

Definitely not supported as Storage Spaces require direct access to physical disks.
blithespirit
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Re: Storage Spaces & REFS

Post by blithespirit » 1 person likes this post

One of the reasons you will not have support using that method is down to predictive failure, the onboard Raid controller in the path to the raw disk is monitoring for SMART failures on the drives, this blocks Storage Spaces access to the same information and it cannot predict failure or disk errors.
DrCheese
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Re: Storage Spaces & REFS

Post by DrCheese »

ah ok, thanks - Looks like my Raid controller doesn't support passthrough (It's a Dell H700) so I'll look into my options - It may just be a simple REFS volume as mentioned above & monitoring for corruption, which is similar to what we do with Dedupe now but with all the REFS advantages in terms of speed.
lando_uk
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Re: Storage Spaces & REFS

Post by lando_uk »

Gostev wrote:Definitely not supported as Storage Spaces require direct access to physical disks.
Sorry, worked in the lab using RAID0 on an old server for a POC, I wouldn't use it in production as you'd purchase a proper SAS HBA for the JBODs.
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