I've created a test environment using Server 2012 R2 to test and evaluate Storage Spaces. So far I'm not getting the result that I was expecting, so I'm wondering if someone can shed some light on it for me. Here is what I have done so far and then I will explain what is frustrating me:
Initial Config:
- I added four 31.3 GB drives to the server
- I created a single Storage Space using the four physical drives (Pool1) with a total aggregate of 125GB
- I then created 3 25GB Virtual Disks [Vdisk1, vdisk2, vdisk3] (interestingly even though I specified 25GB it created 28GB disks, but whatever). The configuration is Layout: Simple, Provisioning: Fixed
- I also created 3 Volumes using the total space of each drive [vdisk1vol, vdisk2vol, vdisk3vol]
So far so good. Now I wanted to experiment with the hypothetical situation that the volume Vdisk1Vol is running out of space, followed by Vdisk3Vol running out of space.
- I right click on the Vdisk1>Extend Virtual Disk and it showed what I expected that I could extend the drive to a maximum size of 68GB. I choose to extend it to 40GB from it's original 28GB
- I then was also able to extend the volume Vdisk1vol to 40GB (actually 39.9)
- I then right clicked on Vdisk3>Extend Virtual Disk and it also showed what I expected that I could extend the drive to a maximum of 56GB. I went ahead and extended the drive to the maximum 56GB
- I then was able to extend the volume Vdisk3vol to 55.8GB
Again, So far so good. HOWEVER, THIS IS WHERE IT ALL FALLS APART!!! Let's say that the volume Vdisk1vol once again runs out of space and I want to increase its size. The pool1 that I created is out of space and there are also no additional physical disks. My understanding is that I should be able to add my physical disk and add it to the pool and be back in business:
- I then added 3 more 31.3GB physical disks to the system
- Right clicked on my pool (Pool1) and "Add Physical Disk" and added all three of the new physical disks to the pool which gives the pool 96 additional GB of storage... Right?.... Kind of :(
- The Pool does now show that it has a total capacity of 219GB with 93GB or free space
- If I right click on any of the existing Virtual Disks to extend them NO additional space is available :( :(
Here is my problem! I can create new Virtual disks and use the new capacity that was added, but I cannot use the new capacity to extend any of the existing virtual disks. It seems to me that this is kind of defeating the point and much of the documentation that I read always talk about being able to add capacity to existing pools when needed, but I'm not seeing it.
I must be missing something. Can someone add some insight??
Thanks