- [Instructor] Innovation is important,
but it's nice when we find out
that some of the existing technology
has stood the test of time.
The partition and volume options on Windows server
are one thing that has remained constant.
Every hard disk has three layers of preparation
and this model has been in tact
for as long as I can remember.
The first layer is the type of partition table.
Traditionally, a master boot record has held this table
and the BIOS of a computer was designed
to read this table to find system partitions.
Well, BIOS on computers is being upgraded
and ultimately replaced by a technology
that supports bigger hard drives,
faster boot times, and overall, better hardware integration.
UEFI is that new technology
and new hard drive partition tables have evolved
along with it.
The GUID partition table or GPT configuration
is the default setting for a Windows 2019 server.
Once we have a partition table in place,
the second layer in the Windows server
preparation of a hard-drive
is specifying the type of disk.
When you complete a traditional install,
Windows lays out a physical disk
with GPT and basic disk configuration.
Basic disks are divided into partitions
that can be formatted and mounted with drive letters
or other types of mount points.
With GPT, a basic disk, can be set up
to hold as many as 128 partitions on a single hard drive.
The primary difference between partitions
on a basic disk and volumes on a dynamic disk
is the range of options that you have when setting them up.
Partitions can be resized up or down
even after they've been created and filled with content
and this is easily done from disk management
or from the Windows Administration Center.
However, if you want more flexibility,
more redundancy, more performance benefits,
you're going to need to look at dynamic disk
and creating different types of volumes.
Let's go ahead and check out what that looks like.
Now, I've created a whole 'nother domain of demo machines
because we're played around with several different features
in the earlier videos of this course.
Right now, we have an environment
where the domain controller and two servers
joined to that domain.
This server, Sever One,
is installed with Windows Server 2019 Data Center,
but what we're going to look at is the same
in Standard Edition and even in Essentials.
I'm going to open up the traditional disk manager.
You can get there by right-clicking on the Start menu
and finding Disk Management in that list.
Much like the design of partitions and volumes themselves,
this tool has been with us for quite some time.
You can see that this server was installed
with two hard drives,
each one roughly 128 gig in size
and when I installed this server, I accepted defaults.
So it took all of the available space
on the first hard drive to create the volume
to install Windows.
This is where my boot files are located.
This is where the operating system is located.
Currently, this is where everything,
except for recovery information, is located,
and it's taking up the entire disk.
If I wanted to reduce this,
I could do that from right here.
I could right-click on that volume
that's currently taking 127 and almost 1/2 gig in space.
I could right-click on that
and choose to shrink the volume.
It's taking up the entire space
so I don't have the ability to grow the volume,
but I can shrink it
and this is a pretty straightforward and simple process
to complete.
It calculates how much room there is on the drive,
how much space I have to play with,
and the question it asks me is not how big
should this partition be when you're done?
The question is how much do you want to trim off?
It's going to allow me to trim off
as much as 120 gig.
I don't want to take it down that far.
I still want about 64 gig to play with on this volume,
so I'm going to cut this down by,
let's go with 60 gigabytes.
It's asking me to give the information in meg
and I'm going to just round
and let's go with 60,000.
And I can go ahead and shrink that volume.
And you can see that that happens pretty quickly.
Now, I'm going to right-click on that volume again
and we can see some other options in here.
We can shrink the volume again
or we could actually grow it.
We could extend it,
and I'm given the option to add a mirror,
but there's a catch here.
I really can't.
I can't add a mirror to this because it's a basic disk.
If I want the option to create a mirrored set,
or to even create striped sets for performance,
I need to change this drive from basic to dynamic
and that's not a difficult change to make either.
It does technically carry some risk.
I've never had anything go wrong,
but we are changing the layout of the hard drive,
so I need to go on record as saying
there is some risk here.
If I want more flexibility in how these drives are set up,
I can right-click on the disk
and I can choose to convert it to dynamic disk.
And I have the option to go ahead
and convert everything to dynamic disk at this time
and I'm going to take that option
and go ahead and click OK.
It will verify that that's what I want to do
and I'm going to go ahead and say yes.
And once this is done, I'm going to reboot.
I have a caution here
that if I have a multi-boot environment,
or some other situations,
there may be some changes that'll be hard to recover from,
but I'm running one operating system on one server.
Most of the concerns really don't apply to me
so I'm going to go ahead and say yes,
I want to convert to dynamic disks.
Now, it didn't prompt me to reboot
and it's possible that I could go on and be just fine,
however, there are some system configuration changes
that are worth manually rebooting the machine
even if it doesn't require it.
One of the things that I'm going to do first, however,
is create a mirrored set.
Now that I have dynamic disks,
I can take the system partition, right-click,
and choose to add a mirror to it.
And I can tell it which physical disk
needs to hold the replica, the copy,
so I'm going to select that
and when I click add mirror,
it would go ahead and create the redundant volume
and start copying the information over.
And it may take some time to complete,
but once the status changes from resyncing to healthy,
that would be a good opportunity
to go ahead and reboot the server
and allow it to come up fresh and clean
with the new configuration.
Any new volume that I create,
anything that's not the operating system,
has options beyond simply mirroring.
If I were to right-click in this unallocated space,
I could choose to set up a striped set.
If I had at least three physical disks,
I could create a new RAID 5 volume.
These software RAID arrays
are available to you if you're using dynamic disk.
Many production servers use hardware solutions
to manage this kind of redundancy,
and data centers with large numbers of virtual servers
often store virtual hard drives in various types
of high availability storage solutions,
but these volume options still exist
at the operating system in Windows Server 2019,
just like they have for the last couple of decades.