- [Narrator] I wanted to be sure and include a section
on a feature that was introduced in Windows Server 2016,
but has not been present in the semiannual releases
of Server in 2017 or 18.
I was really glad to see Storage Spaces Direct
included in Windows Server 2019 once again.
At its core, S2D is a clustering of hard drives.
Large environments need to use lots of servers to create
highly available redundant and fast solutions
for computing, network, and storage.
And you may recall earlier in this course,
I mentioned that Storage Spaces Direct with Hyper-V
combined to create a hyperconverged infrastructure.
S2D is the storage component of that equation.
But I may be getting ahead of myself.
Let me back up, and describe what Storage Spaces Direct is
and what it does.
Storage Spaces Direct allows you to cluster multiple servers
specifically for storage purposes.
Let's say these three data center edition servers
have the fail-over clustering role
and the Hyper-V role installed.
These three servers each have multiple physical drives
which can be clustered using the fail-over clustering role,
and then enabling Cluster Storage Spaces Direct
will make all of those drives function
as a single storage pool.
That will allow you to create volumes in that pool,
and format these volumes using
the cluster shared volume file system.
That provides two benefits.
First, the volumes appear and function as if they were local
to every server node in the cluster.
Second, the volumes are resilient.
That's one of the keys behind any type of cluster.
A hard drive or a physical server may die,
but the volumes stay online as if nothing happened.
This is the kind of thing you would expect
from a hyperconverged infrastructure,
or from a high-end storage management solution.
But these features are not third party, they're not extra.
They're not even system centers.
They're built right into Windows Server 2019.
No third party applications,
no special requirements from hardware vendors.
Now let's take a look at what happens
when we put this to work.
Let's say each server in the cluster
is running virtual servers for various production tasks.
One of our virtual machines is configured on server one,
and the virtual hard disk file is saved on the S2D volume.
The volume makes the VHD file appear local to server one,
and it's entirely possible
that the working copy might be there.
But here's the cool part.
Let's say the hard drive controller in server one
decides to take a break,
and all of those drives are suddenly offline.
This storage cluster has all the hard drives
in their current state running in the cluster,
replicated across multiple drives.
If the virtual machine is configured
to point to a VHD file in the cluster,
the virtual server never goes offline.
So now virtual machines can migrate over virtual networks
using storage managed in an S2D cluster,
and it really does encompass all three elements
of hyperconverged infrastructure.