- [Instructor] Storage Spaces Direct
is a very robust storage solution
but not all environments need something
that's that intensive.
Networks that don't have large data centers
still need reliable and often redundant data
for high availability.
Often, however, a simple solution will do the trick.
Storage Replica is a feature that you can add
to a Windows 2019 Server Data Center Edition or Standard,
that's a change from Windows Server 2016.
In Windows Server 2019, a Data Center Server
can replicate as many volumes as it likes
to other servers in the domain.
A Standard Edition server can still replicate
one volume from that server to another location.
Let's walk through the requirements
and how to set up Storage Replica within our network.
Here you can see I'm on my Windows 10 workstation.
I'm starting here because I'd like to use
the Windows Admin Center to do this work.
And as we've demonstrated before,
the Windows Admin Center can be installed
and used from a workstation in the domain just fine.
So here I am in my domain.
I have my workstation, I also have three servers.
The domain controller and two file servers.
Let me go ahead and take a look at server one.
Storage Replica needs to have
a source and a target for the replica.
And neither one can be a domain controller.
So here we have a basic file sharing server, server one,
if I scroll down and look at storage,
one of the things I will look for
is the volumes created on that machine.
Let me look and see what's on disk two.
And here I have two volumes that are exactly 30 gig in size.
That size is going to be important.
In fact, let me go ahead
and open another server in a new tab.
In this new tab, let's go ahead and open server two
and take a look at that storage configuration as well.
I scroll down to storage
and I take a look at disk two in this server.
We can see that it also has two volumes
that are exactly 30 gig in size.
Now there's nothing special about the 30 gig size.
What is important is that the sizes match
exactly from one server to another.
The R or the replicate volume,
I chose that letter just to be simple here,
is exactly 30 gig in size and uses the NTFS file system.
On server one, I have an R volume
that is also exactly 30 gig in size.
That matching of the volume to be replicated is critical.
We can start the process to do a replication
but Windows will check and if the sizes don't match,
the replica will fail.
A second volume is needed for a replica
and it doesn't have to be as large
but it also needs to match exactly in size
from one server to the other.
Here I've created an L volume, L for log,
and it is exactly 30 gig in size on server one.
And on server two, I have a log volume
that is also exactly 30 gig in size.
That's the first requirement.
We need the volume to be replicated on both servers
that's exactly the same size and we need a log volume
that will not be used for anything else
that's also exactly the same size on both servers.
With that in place, the next thing we need to do
is look at the roles and features
that are installed on both servers.
Here on server two, let's take a look
at the installed roles and features,
and we're looking for a feature
so I'm going to go ahead and collapse the roles
and scroll down through features
until we get to Storage Replica.
And we can see that that role has been installed.
If it wasn't yet, I could check the box
and install it from here.
Let's go ahead and check server one as well.
Roles and features.
Go ahead and collapse the roles and scroll down
through the alphabetic list of features
to Storage Replica and it's installed.
Those are your requirements.
You need this feature to be installed on both servers
and you have to have volumes that are identical in size
from one server to the next.
Here in the Windows Admin Center,
we now have a new tool and this is recently added.
The Storage Replica option can be selected from the left
and we see that there are currently no partnerships
but we can create one.
As we select new partnerships,
we get a dialogue off to the right
where we start by entering the source computer name
and it's going to look up the server as we type it,
so keep typing until you get to the end
of the fully qualified domain name.
This is server01.landonhotel.com
and it's checking that server out
to make sure that it meets the requirements.
It does meet the requirements
and here it selected a source volume and a log volume.
If it picked them incorrectly,
we could use these dropdowns and change them.
But we do need to assign this replication group a name.
This is a name for the source replication group.
If you're using Standard Edition and only one server,
then it may not feel like this name is all that important.
But if you're going to use Data Center Edition servers,
and create multiple replication groups,
it will be important to give these replication groups
names that make sense.
I'm going to go with simple names
just to save time on typing.
And just call this one source and then under destination,
I can go ahead and pick the computer name
that will receive this replication.
SRV02.landonhotel.com and you may have noticed
that it was looking for the server name
while I was typing.
It tried to find it before I was done
and wasn't able to find a server with the incomplete name.
But with the correct name in place, it found it,
it meets the requirements, and we have once again
the destination volume
and destination log have been selected.
We could change those if it had chosen incorrectly
and we need to give the destination group a name as well.
I'm going to call it target, mostly because target
is shorter to type than destination.
That's all the information we need.
I can go ahead and create this new partnership.
It will verify both machines and start replicating data
from the source machine so that we will then have
two full working copies of all of our data.
I have a notification up here, let's see what it says.
New partnership creation in process.
Once that's done, I'll get a new notification
saying that the partnership is complete
and that the replication has begun.
These replications will copy an entire volume.
If you have multiple shares, multiple directories on there,
the entire volume will be replicated
from one place to another.
That's important to keep track of.
If you're doing this over a long distance,
there may be some latency and some files may take a moment
to be exactly the same between the multiple locations.
It will however, synchronize much faster
than the old DFS folder replication
that was often several hours
or even a couple of days behind.
Here you can see that the new partnership was created
so let me close my notifications
and we can see that this synchronization is now underway.
I can click here for the status and down below,
I could look up any information,
but I can see what I need right here up top.
There is one and a half gig copied so far
out of a 30 gig space.
So we're in the process of the initial replication.
You can use this service as part of a disaster recovery plan
to maintain data in two separate locations
in case of catastrophe,
especially in environments small enough
that more intensive clustering just isn't practical.