Windows Storage Team

Two new modules related to Storage Spaces for Windows PowerShell

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 21:26:00 GMT

Hello,

I’ve just posted two new modules for Windows PowerShell that I wrote which are designed to help with the management and diagnosis of Storage Spaces.

These modules are;

StorageSpaces
This module automates deployment of Storage Spaces and provides intent-based management. For example, instead of using many different cmdlets from the Storage module to create a Storage Space, Initialize it, partition it, and format it, all of these tasks are performed via a single cmdlet in Windows PowerShell.

Additionally these cmdlets will work in conjunction with a Failover Cluster using shared SAS storage with Storage Spaces to create a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) in a single step as well.

Read more and download the module here;
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Storage-Spaces-module-for-4be70a0c

Storage Spaces Performance Diagnostic
This module can be used to diagnose issues where one or more disks in a Storage Pool are performing abnormally, which are resulting in a Storage Space performing slowly.

Read more, and download this module here;
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Storage-Spaces-Performance-9366b756

Thanks, and I hope you find value in using these add-on modules for Windows PowerShell.

Also, I wish to take a moment to apologize to my Wife for the time I’ve spent over the last 2 years or so learning Windows PowerShell and writing these modules, as well as to thank her for not killing me during the process

Thanks also to Wentao Deng for his assistance with the PowerShell remote calls for Failover Clustering management, as well as his assistance with testing and bug fixes during the course of this project.

Sincerely,

Bruce Langworthy

Creating a Bootable USB Disk on Windows 8 for deploying Windows

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 21:00:00 GMT

As an introduction to some of the major improvements in managing your storage via PowerShell in the Windows 8, I wanted to give a comparison of how you would go through the process of creating a bootable USB disk such as would be done for deploying Windows 8 to multiple computers.

Historically, this could have been achieved via Diskpart.exe, as long as I knew the correct disk number, as it was not easy to script this operation with DiskPart.

My scenario for this post is the following;

I have 2 USB disks connected to my machine, and I want to erase only one of these, make it bootable, and copy the Consumer Preview image to this disk for fast deployment on several machines.

Prior method using DiskPart.exe

First, I would need to do some research using Diskpart.exe or DiskMgmt and would need to figure out which of the disks I have was the one that mapped to my USB disk..

Using the Select Disk X, Detail disk commands in Diskpart against every disk, I could eventually determine which of the disks I have connected is the USB disk, which would have allowed me to prepare the disk.

The issue here is this is not really scriptable via DiskPart without building scripts to parse the output of DiskPart to find the correct disk.

Followed by all of the appropriate commands to prepare this disk from diskpart.

This method is painful, and I don’t like painful

Using Windows PowerShell to achieve this scenario using Windows 8:

Warning: The Clear-Disk command does erase the disk(s) specified. Running these commands with multiple USB disks connected would erase all of the USB disks unless the results are filtered further.

List all of the Disks that are connected

Get-Disk

Since I wanted to specifically use a specific USB disk for this process, I need to list only the USB-connected disks:

List all the disks that are connected via USB

Get-Disk | where-object BusType -eq "USB"

Since I have 2 USB disks connected (as seen above), and I only want clear and prepare the first one, I would need to either filter the list above further, or to specify the exact disk to manage, using one of the following approaches:

Get-Disk 7

or

Get-Disk | where-object Bustype –eq “USB” | where-object FriendlyName –like Kingston*

Now that I know how to query for the disk I wanted to erase and prepare, how would I go about scripting this?

$Disk = Get-Disk | where-object Bustype –eq “USB” | where-object FriendlyName –like Kingston*

$Disk | Clear-Disk –RemoveData –Passthru `
      | Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle MBR –Passthru `
      | New-Partition -IsActive -UseMaximumSize -DriveLetter U `
      | Format-Volume -NewFileSystemLabel "Bootable USB" -FileSystem NTFS

Now that the USB disk is prepared, how do I go about mounting the ISO image that I downloaded so that I can copy the files to the USB disk I just prepared?

$ISOPath = "C:\Windows8-ConsumerPreview\Windows8-ConsumerPreview-64bit-English.iso"

Mount-DiskImage $IsoPath

Get-DiskImage $IsoPath | Get-Volume

By going a little further with this example, I could even automate the process of copying the installation files to the new disk, by using the following method to get the source and destination paths for use with Robocopy

$SourcePath = ((Get-Volume `
| where-object Filesystem -eq "UDF").DriveLetter + ':\')

$DestinationPath = (($Disk `
| Get-Partition).DriveLetter +':\')

robocopy $SourcePath $DestinationPath /s

Thanks,

Bruce Langworthy
Senior Program Manager – Windows Storage and FileSystems

Determining disk health using Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:15:00 GMT

Last year, I had posted an article on how to view SMART data from a disk to determine the health of the disk on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2;

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2011/08/11/have-you-ever-wanted-to-know-if-your-disk-is-going-to-fail-before-it-does.aspx

For Windows 8, we took this a step further with the addition of the Get-StorageReliabilityCounter cmdlet in the Storage module for Windows PowerShell.

This information can be obtained by passing either a Disk or a PhysicalDisk object (when using Storage Spaces) to this cmdlet. For example,

Get-Disk 0 | Get-StorageReliablityCounter

or

Get-PhysicalDisk –FriendlyName PhysicalDisk1 | Get-StorageReliablityCounter

By reviewing this information is possible to make several types of determinations, such as:

What is the temperature of my Disk?

Is my disk hotter than the manufacturer recommended maximum?

Has my disk experienced any sort of read or write failures?

Is my SSD disk approaching the end of its use (Via the Wear property).

Has this disk experienced any long delays in reading or writing data

It is important to note that some values are only of interest when compared with drives of the same model, and I wanted to give a couple of concrete examples for how to use these counters effectively:

PropertyName	Suggested Use
Read or Write failures	This counter is of interest without comparing to other drives. Any drive reporting read or write failures should be considered at risk.
Temperature	This counter is most useful when comparing with other drives of the same type and model. It may be normal to see notable differences in the normal operational temperature between dissimilar drive models.
Read or Write Latency	This counter is most useful when comparing with drives of the same type and model, as it would be expected to see differences when comparing different models. For example, a 15K RPM spinning disk would on average report lower latency then a disk spinning at 5400 RPM.

In several cases during the release preview, this information was critical in diagnosing issues with disks in a Storage Spaces pool performing abnormally. These counters were used to easily identify drives which were experiencing long delays in read or write performance, which negatively impacted the performance of a Storage Space.

One note of caution: The display of this information is based the disk device correctly reporting these counters. Not all disks report these types of statistics. So the values reported per-disk may vary.

Example 1: Reliability Counter Information reported by a SAS disk which is part of a Storage Spaces pool.

Example 2: Reliability Counter Information reported by a USB disk

More Information:

Information provided by the Get-StorageReliablityCounter cmdlet is obtained via log pages which are defined in the specification, SCSI Primary Commands 4 (SPC-4). For devices that report this information, the counter information is displayed using this cmdlet.

Information for Drive Manufacturers:

For more information about the Windows logo requirements for providing this information, please refer to the following article on MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/jj134356.aspx

In the section titled Device.Storage.Hd.Scsi.ReliabilityCounters

Thanks,

Bruce

ISO Mounting Scenarios

Atishay Kumar — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 17:54:00 GMT

We hope you had an opportunity to look at the ISO Mounting Windows 8 Blog post. Native support for accessing ISO/VHD files was one of the most requested features for Windows 8. In Windows 8, you can directly mount ISO/VHD files from Windows Explorer and the content is available to you within clicks.

Here is a quick refresher on ISO and VHD files.

An ISO file is a file container that contains all information needed to put the contents on a CD or DVD or Blu-Ray. ISO Mounting Windows8 Blog post explains the format well and we encourage you to read it for more information.

A Virtual Hard-Disk is a representation of a disk in a file which is treated as a physical disk by the Windows. Since it is a file, it can be moved around and provides portability unmatched by physical disks. For more in-depth information on VHD format, we encourage you to read the VHD File Format Specification.

Note: A Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) is a different concept than a Virtual Disk as exposed by the Storage PowerShell module. For more information on Virtual Disks, see the blog post: An Introduction to Storage Management in Windows Server 2012

In this blog post, we look at some common scenarios and PowerShell Cmdlets for ISO/VHD mounting.

Sharing Content on ISO / VHD File with Others

Whether at home or at office, all of us have faced the need to access the contents of an ISO/VHD file. We want to share contents with others quickly and in an easily accessible manner. Windows 8 makes it easy.

To view the contents of an ISO file, you can mount an ISO/VHD by selecting “Mount” option in Explorer Ribbon, double click on the file or right click to select mount option. Windows Explorer will show you the contents immediately. Example shown here uses ISO image of Windows 8.

This post will not discuss mount and eject operations in details. ISO Mounting Windows 8 Blog post covers basic operations in great depth.

Installing software application using ISO Mounting

When software is distributed in form of ISOs, the ISO contents has to be accessible in order to install the software. With ISO Mounting, you don’t have to burn the ISO to an optical disc or use third party software. However, there are cases where installing software after mounting the ISO file may not be very straight forward. We discuss two scenarios in this post.

Determining which executable to run in order to install a software application

When an optical disc containing software installation is inserted, if the software company has specified what executable to run, Windows will run it automatically for you. This behavior is commonly known as Autorun. Autorun is configurable but we will not discuss it in detail in this blog post. When the ISO is mounted, Windows creates a Virtual CD-ROM for you. To protect against malicious software, Windows blocks autorun on this Virtual CD-ROM. In order to figure out which executable to run, refer to the autorun.inf file located on the Virtual CD-ROM.

In the following example that uses “Windows 8” ISO image, autorun.inf tells the executable that should be run in order to install Windows 8. If the Virtual CD-ROM was assigned the drive letter d:, then setup.exe in the autorun.inf file would refer to d:\setup.exe.

Install a software application that requires multiple ISO files for installation

Some software applications require multiple discs for installation. When you put a disc in the optical drive and run the setup to install the software, the setup knows from where the setup is being run from and the associated drive letter. For example, if the optical drive has the drive letter d: associated with it, the setup knows that the setup files reside on d: drive. When the setup asks to take disc one out and put disc two in, setup may rely on the drive letter to know where to read the contents of disc two from.

In case of ISO Mounting, once disc one is ejected and the setup asks for disk two, ISO Mounting does not guarantee that the disc two will get the same drive letter upon mounting. The following example walks-through how to change the drive letter of a Virtual CD-ROM in order to complete the installation successfully.

Open Disk Management by typing “Disk Management” in Start Screen and switch to Settings.

Disk Management UI will show the drive letter associated with the Virtual CD-ROM.

Right click on E: and select the option to “Change Drive Letters and Paths…”.

Select “Change” on the pop-up window to choose the desired drive letter. Windows 8 will now use the new drive letter for the Virtual CD-ROM.

ISO Mounting and Windows 8 Server

ISO mounting is not available on a default installation of Window 8 Server. It is an optional feature that must be enabled in order to mount ISO/VHD files from Windows Explorer. Launch Server Manager by typing “Server Manager” in the Start Screen.

In Server Manager, click on Manage and select “Add Roles and Features”.

Navigate to Features and select “Desktop Experience”.

Alternatively, PowerShell also may be used to install Desktop-Experience package. The picture below demonstrates how to use PowerShell to install Desktop-Experience package.

The machine has to be rebooted before the changes would take effect.

Note that on Windows 8 server, VHD and ISO files can be mounted only by an administrator. This allows admins to control content available to server users.

ISO Mounting and PowerShell

With Windows 8 Developer Preview we introduced you to native support for ISO/VHD Mounting. You gave us feedback, and we are delighted to know that you are excited about the feature. One of features requested by you was to provide scripting support for ISO/VHD Mounting and we have added PowerShell support to mount and eject ISO Files. We hope you enjoy the improvements.

There are three Cmdlets for ISO mounting. Mount-DiskImage, Get-DiskImage and Dismount-DiskImage.

Mount-DiskImage mounts a valid ISO/VHD file and requires full path of the file.

Mount-DiskImage C:\Users\WinVMAdmin\Downloads\Windows8-ConsumerPreview-32bit-English.iso

The Get-DiskImage cmdlet returns information about one or more disk images (ISO or VHD). This cmdlet could also be used to determine if the specified ISO or VHD file is mounted or not.

Get-DiskImage C:\Users\WinVMAdmin\Downloads\Windows8-ConsumerPreview-32bit-English.iso | Get-Volume

DisMount-DiskImage cmdlet can be used to eject an already mounted ISO/VHD file.

DisMount-DiskImage C:\Users\WinVMAdmin\Downloads\Windows8-ConsumerPreview-32bit-English.iso

The following picture demonstrates the above Cmdlets

Getting the drive letter of a mounted VHD requires the use of few other Cmdlets. Just like a physical storage disk could have multiple partitions, a VHD can contain multiple partitions. In order to get the drive letter(s) assigned to the partitions of the mounted VHD, we need to query for partitions and then get volume information of each partition.

Get-DiskImage C:\Users\WinVMAdmin\Downloads\WS2008R2_EnterpriseCore_x64.vhd | Get-Disk | Get-Partition | Get-Volume

If only the drive letter is needed as output then following command would be helpful

(Get-DiskImage C:\Users\WinVMAdmin\Downloads\WS2008R2_EnterpriseCore_x64.vhd | Get-Disk | Get-Partition | Get-Volume).DriveLetter

Get-DiskImage Cmdlet is demonstrated in following picture.

We would love to hear how you are using ISO Mounting. Thank you for reading and enjoy Windows 8!!

Updated : MPIO Guide for DSM Developers

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 16:46:00 GMT

Our guide on creating a DSM for MPIO for storage developers for Windows Server 2012 is now available at the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30454

Thanks,

Bruce

Users Guide for MPIO on Windows Server 2012

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:16:00 GMT

The fully updated version of the users guide for MPIO on Windows Server 2012 is now available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30450

Thanks,

Bruce

Managing iSCSI Initiator connections with Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 22:39:00 GMT

Managing iSCSI Initiator Connections

Updated: 9/18/2012

This post covers iSCSI Initiator connection management using the Iscsi module for Windows PowerShell available with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.

Note: For additional details on management of Windows Disk, Partition, and Volume objects, please refer to the following article:

Managing Storage with Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2012/07/03/managing-storage-with-windows-powershell-on-windows-server-2012.aspx

Background:

Prior to Windows Server 2012, iSCSI Initiator connection management via the command line was performed using the iSCSICLI.exe tool from a CMD prompt. The legacy tool iSCSICLI.exe is superseded by the iSCSI module for Windows PowerShell available on Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 (only).

Prerequisites

The iSCSI module requires that the iSCSI Service and its associated firewall rule be enabled in order to report information back. This can be accomplished via either of the following methods:

Open the iSCSI control panel: The first time that the iSCSI Initiator control panel is opened, you are prompted and asked if you would like to start the service automatically.

Use the following commands in PowerShell;

Set-Service -Name msiscsi -StartupType Automatic

Start-Service msiscsi

Note: at a minimum, the Windows Firewall rule for the iSCSI Initiator Service must also be enabled for outgoing traffic.

To list available firewall rules related to the MSiSCSI Service, use the following command:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-NetFirewallServiceFilter -Service msiscsi | Get-NetFirewallRule | Select DisplayGroup,DisplayName,Enabled

Connecting to a new iSCSI Target

Connecting to a new iSCSI Target is a two-step process. First an iSCSI Target Portal is established using the New-iSCSITargetPortal cmdlet, and then a connection is established using the Connect-iSCSITarget cmdlet.

Creating a new iSCSI Target Portal

For example, I have a new iSCSI target named DeepSpace that I need to establish a connection with. I would complete the connection using the following command:

New-IscsiTargetPortal –TargetPortalAddress DeepSpace

Viewing available iSCSI Targets

After a new target portal is created, the iSCSI target, and its connection status are displayed via the Get-IscsiTarget cmdlet as shown below:

Connecting to available iSCSI Targets

To connect to all available iSCSI Targets, use the following command:

Get-IscsiTarget | Connect-IscsiTarget

Listing iSCSI Connections and sessions:

View currently connected iSCSI Sessions and connections using the following commands;

To view iSCSI Connections:

Get-iSCSIConnection

To View iSCSI Sessions:

Get-iSCSISession

To list all Windows disks for a specific iSCSI session:

Get-iSCSISession | Get-Disk

Listing the iSCSI IQN for the iSCSI Initiator

You can list the current iSCSI Qualified Name (IQN) by using the following command: The iSCSI IQN for the initiator is typically used when configuring masking sets with an iSCSI Target device to allow access by a specific initiator to an iSCSI Target device.

(Get-InitiatorPort).NodeAddress

Configuring sessions to persist across reboots:

An iSCSI Session that has a property of IsPersistent = $True will automatically attempt reconnection on a system reboot. For example, the connection below is not persistent:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-IscsiSession

AuthenticationType      : NONE
InitiatorInstanceName   : ROOT\ISCSIPRT\0000_0
InitiatorNodeAddress    : iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:deepcore.contoso.com
InitiatorPortalAddress : 0.0.0.0
InitiatorSideIdentifier : 400001370000
IsConnected             : True
IsDataDigest            : False
IsDiscovered            : False
IsHeaderDigest          : False
IsPersistent            : False
NumberOfConnections     : 1
SessionIdentifier       : fffffa80144f8430-4000013700000003
TargetNodeAddress       : iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:deepspace-deepcore-target
TargetSideIdentifier    : 0300
PSComputerName          :

When connecting to a new iSCSI Target using the Connect-iSCSITarget cmdlet, persistence is managed via the –IsPersistent Boolean value.

For example,

Get-iSCSITarget | Connect-IscsiTarget –IsPersistent $False would prevent the new connection from persisting across reboots.

Note: Connections are persistent by default unless overridden by specifying –IsPersistent $False

For an existing session, if the session is not persistent, it can be made persistent by piping the session to the Register-iSCSISession cmdlet. For example:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-IscsiSession | Where-Object IsPersistent -eq $False

In this case, since I have an iSCSI Session which is not persistent, I could pipe this object to Register-IscsiSession to make it persistent.

Get-IscsiSession | Register-IscsiSession

Connecting to an iSCSI Target when using CHAP Secrets

To connect to an iSCSI Target which requires the use of a CHAP secret, you can use the following cmdlet options, and select the appropriate type of CHAP secret to use in the –AuthenticationType parameter.

Get-iScsiTarget | Connect-iScsitarget –AuthenticationType ONEWAYCHAP –ChapUserName <username> -ChapSecret <secret>

Advanced Configuration Management: Using MPIO with iSCSI Connections.

Connecting multiple network adapters in conjunction with iSCSI and MPIO:

Note: MPIO is available on Windows Server versions only.

Tip: List your IPv4 addresses using the Get-NetIPAddress cmdlet

Get-NetIPAddress –AddressFamily IPv4 –PrefixOrigin DHCP

For example, if I stored the output of the above command in the variable $Nics on a machine with 2 network adapters, then $Nics[0].IpAddress returns the IP address for my first NIC, and $Nics[1].Ipaddress returns the IP address for my second NIC.

For the rest of this example, I have used the above to populate two variables;

$Nic1 = $Nics[0]

$Nic2 = $Nics[1]

Configuring MPIO to automatically claim devices:

Tip: By configuring MPIO to automatically claim iSCSI devices (for example) before any are connected, you may be able to avoid an extra reboot when the disks are claimed.

In the example below, I am installing the MPIO feature, enabling automatic claiming of all iSCSI disks, and setting the default load balance policy in MPIO to Round Robin:

# Enable the MPIO Feature
     Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName MultipathIO

# Enable automatic claiming of iSCSI devices for MPIO
     Enable-MSDSMAutomaticClaim -BusType iSCSI

# Set the default load balance policy of all newly claimed devices to Round Robin
     Set-MSDSMGlobalDefaultLoadBalancePolicy -Policy RR

Connecting with MPIO and iSCSI using multiple Network adapters

First we will need to define the targetportal to point to the iSCSI Target. In my example below, the target portal is named DeepSpace

New-IscsiTargetPortal –TargetPortalAddress DeepSpace

Lastly, we would create one MPIO-enabled iSCSI connection per network adapter using the following commands:

Get-IscsiTarget | Connect-IscsiTarget -IsPersistent $True –IsMultipathEnabled $True –InitiatorPortalAddress $Nic1.IPAddress

Get-IscsiTarget | Connect-IscsiTarget -IsPersistent $True –IsMultipathEnabled $True –InitiatorPortalAddress $Nic2.IPAddress

Viewing connections to determine which Network Adapter is used

Get-iSCSIConnection displays the IP address for the network adapter used with this connection(s). For example;

Viewing advanced properties for a disk which is connected via iSCSI:

The following example shows listing all disks associated with the active iSCSI Connection(s) in the system.

This process can also be reversed to determine the iSCSI connections for a specific Disk object such as by passing the output of Get-Disk 1 to Get-iSCSIConnection.

Additional References:

Complete list of cmdlets in the iSCSI module:

For a complete listing of the cmdlets contained in the iSCSI module for Windows PowerShell, please refer to the following document on TechNet:
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826099.aspx

iSCSI Initiator WMI V2 Classes for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh968118(v=vs.85).aspx

Thanks,

Bruce

Managing MPIO with Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 23:44:00 GMT

Installing and Managing MPIO using PowerShell:

This post is intended as an overview of capabilities present in the MPIO module for managing MPIO on Windows Server 2012.

Note: The MPIO feature is available on Windows Server 2012 versions only.

Use of the MPIO module in Windows PowerShell requires an “elevated” PowerShell window, opened with Administrator privileges.

Query the installation state of MPIO:

To determine if MPIO is currently installed, use the following command:

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature –Online –FeatureName MultiPathIO

Enable or Disable the MPIO Feature:

If the MPIO feature is not currently installed, use the following command to enable the MPIO feature:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature –Online –FeatureName MultiPathIO

To disable the MPIO feature, use the following command:

Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature –Online –FeatureName MultiPathIO

Listing commands available in the MPIO module:
The commands available in the MPIO module can be listed using get-command as shown below

Note: Not all of these cmdlets are available in the Release Preview.

Full help and example content for the MPIO module is available via the following method:

In PowerShell, after importing the MPIO module or using any MPIO cmdlet, updated help can be downloaded from the internet by running the following command:
- Update-Help

Obtaining additional PowerShell help and examples

For a complete list of available PowerShell cmdlets in the MPIO module, including usage and examples, please refer to the following TechNet site:

MPIO Cmdlets in Windows PowerShell
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826113.aspx

You can also obtain help for individual commands by specifying the cmdlet with Get-Help, such as shown below:

Get-Help Get-MPIOAvailableHW

Obtaining and updating help for Windows PowerShell cmdlets

In Windows 8, PowerShell modules which ship with Windows do not include help content “in-box” instead this content is provided on the Internet, and may be updated via PowerShell from a computer which has Internet access.

Once a PowerShell module has been imported into the current PowerShell session, the help content may be downloaded and updated via the following command:

Update-Help

Note: the –Force parameter must be used if attempting to update more than once per 24 hour period.

The get-help cmdlet offers multiple levels of verbosity, which include

No switch specified, only basic help is returned.
Detailed provides detailed help
Example provides examples of the cmdlet in use.
Full provides all available help content for the specified cmdlet.

For example, in order to obtain script examples for the Get-MPIOAvailableHW cmdlet, the following command is utilized:

Get-Help Get-MPIOAvailableHW –Examples

Script Example: Configuring MPIO using PowerShell:

In this example, I wish to perform the following tasks:

Tip: If these steps are performed prior to connecting devices of the desired BusType, you can typically avoid the need for a restart.

Install the MPIO feature on a new Windows Server 2012 installation.
Configure MPIO to automatically claim all iSCSI devices.
Configure the default Load Balance policy for Round Robin.
Set the Windows Disk timeout to 60 seconds.

Here is what this script would look like:

Scripting the Configuration of MPIO Timer Values

Timers for MPIO can be managed using the Get-MPIOSetting and Set-MPIOSetting PowerShell cmdlets:

Example: Viewing the current MPIO settings.

Additional References:

MPIO PowerShell cmdlets list and help documentation:
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826113.aspx

Managing Storage with Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 21:46:00 GMT

Managing local Windows Storage

This post covers basic provisioning operations against local Windows storage resources using the Storage module for Windows PowerShell.

Note: I will cover using the Storage module in combination with a Storage Management Provider to manage a storage subsystem (array) in a subsequent post.

The Disk, Partition, and Volume objects are associated as shown in the figure below. When starting from a new (blank) disk, you first initialize the disk to create a partition, and then you create a Volume with a file system such as NTFS.

The following sections discuss the operations that you can perform with each type of object – Disk, Partition, and Volume. They also discuss setting the policy of whether to automatically mount new disks, and how to use the various cmdlets to format a new disk for use.

Disk

A Disk object represents a disk as seen by a Windows computer, and does not require an available management provider. An example of a Disk object is a disk displayed in the Disk Management snap-in.

Listing all disks in the system

To list all Disks visible to the operating system, type:

Get-Disk

Listing only the system disk or all disks except the system disk

To list only the system disk, type the following command:

Get-Disk | Where-Object IsSystem -eq $True

To list all disks except the system disk, instead type this command, which pipes the output of the Get-Disk cmdlet to the Where-Object cmdlet:

Get-Disk | where-object IsSystem -eq $False

Listing all disks for a specific storage bus

To list all disks attached via a specific storage bus, type the following command, replacing <BusType> with the bus you want to query:

Get-Disk | Where-Object -Eq <BusType>

For example, to list all of the Storage Spaces that are connected, query disks connected via the “Spaces” bus. This method can also be used for other bus types, such as iSCSI and USB:

Clearing all of the partitions and volumes from a disk

To clear all partitions and volumes from a disk, backup all data on all volumes on the disk, and then type the following command:

Warning: This is operation cannot be undone; it will clear all partitions and volumes from the disk and allows the disk to be re-initialized and create a new partition and volume.

Clear-Disk 6 -RemoveData

Note: If the specified disk contains an OEM partition, such as for system recovery, it is also necessary to specify the –RemoveOEM switch when using the clear-disk cmdlet.

Initializing a disk

To initialize a disk to allow creation of a partition and volume, type the following command, where <DiskNumber> is the number of the disk to initialize:

Initialize-Disk <DiskNumber>

Note: All disks are initialized as GPT by default unless otherwise specified.

To initialize a disk as MBR, use the –PartitionStyle parameter. For example:

Initialize-Disk 4 –PartitionStyle MBR

Listing all disks that are offline

To list all disks that are currently offline, type the following command:
Get-Disk | Where-Object IsOffline –Eq $True

Bringing all offline disks online

To bring all disks that are currently offline back online, type the following command:

Get-Disk | Where-Object IsOffline –Eq $True | Set-Disk –IsOffline $False

Partition

A Disk object can contain one or more logical regions called partitions, which are represented by a Partition object. With the exception of special purpose partitions such as a Microsoft Reserved (MSR), or OEM recovery partition, Microsoft recommends creating one data partition per disk.

Listing all of the partitions on all disks

To list all partitions on all disks, type the following command:

Get-Partition

Listing all of the partitions on a specific disk

To list all partitions on a specific disk, type the following command, replacing <DiskNumber> with the number of the appropriate disk:

Get-Partition –DiskNumber <DiskNumber>

Creating a new partition on a new disk

To create a new partition on a blank disk, first use the Initialize-Disk cmdlet, then type the following command, replacing <DiskNumber> with the number of the appropriate disk:

New-Partition –DiskNumber <DiskNumber> -UseMaximumSize -AssignDriveLetter

Volume

A Volume object is the highest level object in the Disk-Partition-Volume hierarchy and represents a Partition object that has been formatted with a file system such as NTFS or ReFS and is available for data storage.

Listing all volumes

To list all volumes accessible to Windows, type:

Get-Volume

Listing the volume for a specific drive letter

To list the volume for a specific drive letter, type the following, replacing <DriveLetter> with the letter of the drive you want to view:

Get-Volume –DriveLetter <DriveLetter>

Formatting a volume

To format a volume with the NTFS file system, type the following, replacing <DriveLetter> with the letter of the drive you want to format:

Format-Volume -DriveLetter <DriveLetter>

Storage Settings object

The new disk policy (previously known as the SAN Policy) is the policy Windows uses to determine whether Windows should automatically ‘mount’ disks that are detected as new.

Viewing the new disk policy

To view the new disk policy, type the following command:

Get-StorageSetting | Select-Object NewDiskPolicy

Set the NewDiskPolicy

To set the new disk policy, type the following command:

Set-StorageSetting –NewDiskPolicy OfflineShared

Note: The default setting for NewDiskPolicy on Windows 8 is OnlineAll. The default setting on all Windows Server 2012 editions is OfflineShared.

Policy Setting	Effect
OfflineAll	All new disks are left offline by default.
OfflineInternal	All disks on busses that are detected as internal are left offline as default.
OfflineShared	All Disks on sharable busses, such as iSCSI, FC, or SAS are left offline by default
OnlineAll	All disks are automatically brought online.

Combined Example: Format a New Disk

To format a new disk that has not been initialized, first we should get all Disk objects and then pipe the objects to the Where-Object cmdlet to select only disks with the RAW partition style (which indicates that the disks haven’t yet been initialized). To do so, type the following command:

Get-Disk | Where-Object PartitionStyle –Eq "RAW"

Then, use the Initialize-Disk cmdlet to initialize the disk. After that, use the New-Partition cmdlet to create a partition on the disk, and pipe the output to the Format-Volume cmdlet to format the volume with the NTFS file system. To do so, type the following commands:

Initialize-disk 3

New-Partition -DiskNumber 3 -UseMaximumSize -AssignDriveLetter | Format-Volume -NewFileSystemLabel "Mirror" -FileSystem NTFS

Bruce Langworthy

Senior Program Manager – Windows Storage and Filesystems

Introduction to Storage Management on Windows Server 2012 (Part 2)

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 02:43:27 GMT

Understanding Custom object views in the Storage Module for Windows PowerShell

Before I delve into the actual usage of the cmdlets present in the Storage module, I wanted to explain a bit about how the parameters and information are displayed. The default view of most Storage cmdlets display only the most commonly accessed properties of an object, which can be a little confusing unless you know there are other parameters that you can access.

For the first article in this series, see the post below:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2012/06/26/an-introduction-to-storage-management-in-windows-server-2012.aspx

The Storage module uses a custom object format that varies the parameters returned based on whether the object is viewed in table or list format. This is done so that the default (table) view is easy to read.

To display an expanded set of properties, use the Format-List cmdlet shown in Figure 1. For example, Get-Disk | Format-List.

Note: In the figure below, FL is an alias to Format-List.

To view a complete list of properties, use the Format-List * command shown in Figure 3. For example, Get-Disk | Format-List *).

Figure 1: The default (table) view for Get-Disk

Figure 2: The list view for Get-Disk

Figure 3: The list view of ALL object properties for Get-Disk. (Using Format-List *)

Available Windows PowerShell modules related to managing Storage

Storage Management scenarios are managed via Windows PowerShell in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 using the following modules:

Module name	Purpose
Storage	Provides management interfaces for local storage and storage objects exposed via a Storage Management Provider
MPIO	Allows configuration of the Multipath I/O (MPIO) feature. (Windows Server 2012 only).
iSCSI	Provides iSCSI initiator connection management

To obtain a list of the commands in any of these modules, use the following commands in Windows PowerShell:

Get-Command –Module <ModuleName>

For example, to obtain a list of all of the Windows PowerShell cmdlets in the Storage module, use the following commands:

Get-Command –Module Storage

Obtaining and Updating help for Windows PowerShell Modules:

In Windows 8, Windows PowerShell Help includes only a basic listing of parameters “in-box”. The complete Help is published to Microsoft TechNet, and you can update Windows PowerShell to include this Help from any computer that has Internet access.

Once a Windows PowerShell module has been imported into the current Windows PowerShell session, the help content may be downloaded and updated via the following command:

Update-Help

Note: the –Force parameter must be used if attempting to update more than once per 24 hour period.

To display help for a specific cmdlet, use the following command:

Get-Help <Cmdlet>

For example, to get help for the Get-Disk cmdlet, use

Get-Help Get-Disk

The get-help cmdlet offers multiple levels of verbosity, which include

No parameter specified, only basic help is displayed.
Detailed provides detailed help
Example provides examples of the cmdlet in use.
Full provides all available help content for the specified cmdlet.

For example, to obtain script examples for the Get-Disk cmdlet, use the following command:

Get-Help Get-Disk –Examples

This returns output similar to the following:

Figure 4: The Help examples included with the Get-Disk cmdlet

Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 contain the Storage Management API, associated WMI classes, and the Storage module for Windows PowerShell.

Note: Windows PowerShell and the Storage module are not available by default in Windows PE. I will cover in a subsequent post building a custom Windows PE image that includes the Storage module and Windows PowerShell optional components for Windows PE.

The Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service is available only on Windows Server 2012, and is required for the use of SMI-S providers with Storage Management (it is also not available from Windows PE).

Other available management interfaces for storage:

Storage Spaces Control Panel

Windows 8 includes the Storage Spaces control panel item, shown in Figure 5. The Storage Spaces control panel item provides a simple user interface that end-users can use to configure and manage the Storage Spaces subsystem for personal storage. It cannot be used for management of other Storage Management Providers, and is available only on Windows 8.

Figure 5: Storage Spaces in Control Panel in Windows 8

File and Storage Services canvas in Server Manager

Windows Server 2012 includes the File and Storage Services role in Server Manager, which enables you to remotely manage multiple file servers from a single window, including Storage Spaces, and other installed Storage Management Providers or SMI-S providers.

Figure 6: File and Storage Services in Server Manager in Windows Server 2012

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 include a rich set of management classes intended for use by developers creating management applications for storage.

TechEd video on Standards Support and Storage Management for Windows Server 2012

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 14:01:00 GMT

Be sure to check out the excellent TechEd video “Standards Support and Interoperability in Windows Server 2012: Storage, Networking, and Management” here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Europe/2012/WSV308

Pointers to some specific sections of the video:

Information on standards starts at about the 30 minute mark.
Storage specific content starts at the 1 hour mark
Management demo with an SMI-S provider at 1:09

Thanks,

Bruce

An Introduction to Storage Management in Windows Server 2012

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 23:55:00 GMT

Introducing the Windows Storage Management API (SMAPI)

Windows® Server 2012 delivers capabilities to enable significantly improved storage management. By doing so, Windows customers will enjoy the benefits of decreased management complexity and associated costs.

Improved storage management related capabilities include:

The Windows Storage Management API (SMAPI) which provides PowerShell Cmdlets via the Storage module for end to end management of Windows storage as well as a new set of WMI management classes.
PowerShell cmdlets enabling scriptable and remote administration with decreased management costs by allowing for repeatable configuration scripts, which are easily re-usable across different storage subsystems.
A new interface – the Storage Management Provider framework – enabling customers to easily manage 3^rd-party Storage subsystems using either a Storage Management Provider (SMP), or SMI-S Provider.

Note: As a result of the introduction of the Windows Storage Management API, the Virtual Disk Service (VDS) is being deprecated. Please see the following link for more information:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848071(v=vs.85).aspx

High Level Architecture overview:

The following diagram shows the functional architecture for the Storage Management API, and how the Windows Standards-Based Storage Management service is integrated with the Storage Management API to provide flexible management via either management applications or PowerShell.

By combining the Storage Management API with either a Storage Management Provider (SMP), or the Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service and an SMI-S provider, users are able to deploy and manage their storage using a common interface such as PowerShell, or Microsoft management applications such as the File and Storage Services canvas in Server Manager.

Note:

Management of Windows storage resources (Disk, Partition, and Volume) is provided directly by the Storage Management API.

A SMP or SMI-S Provider is only required for managing storage subsystems.

Irrespective of whether an SMP or SMI-S provider is used with your storage, the management processes are the same. For example, multiple management providers can be installed, and manage multiple subsystems simply by specifying the subsystem to manage.

In either case, an end to end deployment workflow enabled by the Storage Management API would be the same:

In the example below, virtual disks are shown from Storage Spaces, an EMC SMI-S provider, and a Hitachi SMI-S Provider all via one command:

More Information:

Note: In addition to the management of storage resources using the storage module, there is also an MPIO module for managing Microsoft MPIO, and an iSCSI module for managing Microsoft iSCSI Initiator connections. I will cover these in detail in a subsequent posts.

For information on deploying and managing Storage Spaces, the built in subsystem in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, please refer to the following whitepaper:

Deploy and Manage Storage Spaces using PowerShell:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2012/06/12/managing-storage-spaces-using-powershell-whitepaper-is-now-available.aspx

For a list of the cmdlets contained in the Storage module, refer to the following topic on TechNet:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx

Introduction to SMI-S
http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/06/25/introduction-to-smi-s.aspx

Thanks,

Bruce Langworthy
Senior Program Manager – Windows Storage and Filesystems

An Introduction to SMI-S

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:40:00 GMT

Jeff Goldner has posted an introduction to the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) for storage management that covers the following topics. This post is available here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/06/25/introduction-to-smi-s.aspx

And covers the following topics:

Introduction to SMI-S

Providers
Classes
Associations

What Microsoft is doing with SMI-S
What it means for hardware vendors
Next up
Additional References

Thanks,

Bruce

Managing Storage Spaces using PowerShell Whitepaper is now available

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 02:19:00 GMT

Our newest whitepaper, which details how to deploy and manage Storage Spaces in the Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate is now available at the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30125

Here is a list of the sections in this whitepaper:

Introduction: Managing Storage Spaces using PowerShell
Background on Storage Spaces and the Storage Management API
Deploy and Manage Storage Spaces with PowerShell
Maintaining Storage Spaces
Advanced Storage Spaces configuration options
Glossary
Additional References

Thanks,

Bruce Langworthy

Analyzing Storage Performance using the Windows Performance Analysis Toolkit (WPT)

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:11:00 GMT

I wanted to make sure everyone has seen this excellent blog posting from Robert Smith in Premier Field Engineering (PFE), on using the WPT to get to the bottom of performance issues with the Storage Stack. Please check out his post and use this the next time you have a performance issue with Storage.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/robertsmith/archive/2012/02/07/analyzing-storage-performance-using-the-windows-performance-toolkit.aspx

This includes the following topics:

Obtaining the WPT
Getting Started: Capturing Storage Performance Data

Considerations for starting a trace
Stopping a trace

Trace Analysis
What to look for (in a trace)
High Disk service times
Storport Tracing
High I/O Times

Thanks,

Bruce

Links to Storage resources for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:34:00 GMT

Updated: 7/1/2012

As it can be difficult to locate all of our public content related to Storage and FileSystems on various Microsoft sites for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Windows Server “8” beta, I wanted to provide a list of documentation related to the consumer preview.

The list below is intended to be a starting point of available resources from the Storage team.

Introductions:

An Introduction to Storage Management in Windows Server 2012
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2012/06/26/an-introduction-to-storage-management-in-windows-server-2012.aspx

Introduction to SMI-S for Storage Management
http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/06/25/introduction-to-smi-s.aspx

Technical Guides:

About the Windows Storage Management API
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Hh830613

Deploy and Manage Storage Spaces using Windows PowerShell
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2012/06/12/managing-storage-spaces-using-powershell-whitepaper-is-now-available.aspx

Understand and Troubleshoot Storage Spaces in Windows Server “8” Beta
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29002


Encrypted Hard Drive Technical Preview
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831627.aspx

Multi-terabyte Volumes Technical Preview
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831536.aspx

Windows Server “8” Beta – Hyper-V over SMB – Quick Provisioning a VM on an SMB FileShare:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/03/20/windows-server-8-beta-hyper-v-over-smb-quick-provisioning-a-vm-on-an-smb-file-share.aspx

Windows Server “8” Beta Scale-Out File Server for SQL Server 2012 – Step-by-step Installation:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/03/15/windows-server-8-beta-scale-out-file-server-for-sql-server-2012-step-by-step-installation.aspx

VSS For SMB File Shares
http://blogs.technet.com/b/clausjor/archive/2012/06/14/vss-for-smb-file-shares.aspx

PowerShell References:

Storage Management PowerShell cmdlets
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx

iSCSI Initiator PowerShell cmdlets
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826099.aspx

iSCSI Target PowerShell cmdlets
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826097.aspx

iSCSI Block Storage How Guide:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848268.aspx

MPIO PowerShell cmdlets (Windows 8 Server Preview only)
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826113.aspx

Windows PowerShell Reference Sheet for File and Storage Services in Windows Server “8” Beta
http://blogs.technet.com/b/roiyz/archive/2012/03/06/windows-powershell-reference-sheet-for-file-and-storage-services-in-windows-server-8-beta.aspx?Redirected=true

WMI Management references:

Storage Management API – WMI v2 Classes
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh830612(v=vs.85).aspx

Storage Management WMI Application Sample
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Storage-management-ddef6afc

Managing System Restore points with PowerShell

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:35:07 GMT

Jeffery Hicks has posted a great article on managing system restore points via PowerShell here:

http://mcpmag.com/articles/2012/02/21/powershell-windows-restore.aspx

-Bruce

Updated Guidance on Microsoft MPIO Settings

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 02:59:00 GMT

Last updated 2/22/2012

In the Microsoft Multipath I/O Step by Step guide for Windows Server 2008 R2 two new MPIO registry keys were introduced (UseCustomPathRecoveryInterval and PathRecoveryInterval) to mitigate a transient error. We issued post-release guidance previously and have recently updated our guidance as described below.

For additional information about MPIO settings, please refer to the Microsoft Multipath I/O Step-By-Step guide here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee619749(WS.10).aspx

Background on the issue:

The two new settings were introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 to help mitigate the issue detailed below:

A transient error can cause a path to briefly fail and recover.
MPIO detects that the path has failed and then performs a failover.
The failed path was the last path for a particular pseudo-LUN, so the associated PDO Remove Timer started ticking down.
The error was brief enough and PnP was busy enough that PnP missed the fact that the path went away and came back. Therefore, there are no PnP events generated to indicate that the path is back online.
The pseudo-LUN never sees the path come back online and it gets removed after the PDO Remove Timer runs out.

The end result is that the system has at least one path and one device online, but no pseudo-LUN to represent that device.

MPIO has a path recovery mechanism that can be used to avoid this issue. However, by default, the period at which path recovery is attempted is set to twice in the PDORemovePeriod. In the majority of cases, the default is acceptable, but it does not solve the problem in this particular scenario.

This is where the CustomPathRecoveryInterval setting comes into play. They allow you to configure a timer that determines the period at which path recovery attempts are performed. By setting the PathRecoveryInterval to less than the PDORemovePeriod, the path recovery attempt executes before the pseudo-LUN is removed, the path is detected as back online, and the pseudo-LUN is saved from removal.

We recommend that you test the use of this value before widespread deployment in production to ensure that path recovery attempts are not happening so frequently that they have a significant impact on regular I/O.

Updated guidance:

As the default settings allow for the potential that a path recovery under high load may be missed, we are making the following updated recommendation around the use of these settings. Note however, that, as always, settings should be evaluated for potential impact in a test environment prior to implementing changes in production environments.

We now recommend that the keys above be considered for wider use since they have the potential to allow path recovery under load in situations that might otherwise result in a path failure and I/O delays.

A warning about this value. The PathRecoveryInterval controls how often MPIO will check to see if the device has returned after an error. This translates to a greater amount of traffic to the array. Caution should be used when implementing this setting, as implementing this change with a value that is too low may cause adverse performance impact.

Our general guidance going forward for this setting is as follows:

The PDORemovePeriod should be set to a minimum of 30 seconds.
UseCustomPathRecoveryInterval would be set to 1 to enable custom path recovery.
PathRecoveryInterval should be set to a value approximately 10 seconds less than the PDO remove period. Additionally we recommend that this value not be set below 20 seconds to mitigate performance degradation risk.

It is also important to note that the PDORemovePeriod must be set to a value less than the global Windows Disk Timeout, to allow path recovery prior to I/O timeouts. For more information on the global Windows “Disk” timeout registry key, please see the article link at the end of this post.

For example:

If the Windows Disk timeout is 30 seconds

AND

The PDORemovePeriod is 25 seconds

Then a good starting point value for PathRecoveryInterval would be 15 to 20 seconds.

Setting

Definition

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\mpio\Parameters\

UseCustomPathRecoveryInterval

If this key exists and is set to 1, it allows the use of PathRecoveryInterval.

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\mpio\Parameters\

PathRecoveryInterval

Represents the period after which PathRecovery is attempted. This setting is only used if it is not set to 0 and UseCustomPathRecoveryInterval is set to 1.

Additional Guidelines for setting timeouts:

Regardless of the values that you choose for MPIO, it is crucial that the following rules be used when setting the timeouts referenced in this article:

The Windows Disk timeout (detailed in the article below) must have the highest value.
The PDORemovePeriod must be less than the Disk timeout setting
The CustomPathRecoveryInterval must be less than the value used for PDORemovePeriod.

Note: The settings detailed in this article are also useful in the recovery of paths with the iSCSI Initiator and MPIO.

Additional References:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2011/09/01/the-windows-disk-timeout-value-understanding-why-this-should-be-set-to-a-small-value.aspx

Thanks,

The MPIO Team

An update on Storage and Continuous Availability Enhancements in Windows Server 8

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:10:00 GMT

For those of you eager for more Windows 8 related news, there is a new blog posting from Thomas Pfenning , at the link below that details improvements in Storage and Continuous Availability for Windows Server 8:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/09/20/storage-and-continuous-availability-enhancements-in-windows-server-8.aspx

Updated Guidance from the Exchange Server team on disk timeouts

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:26:22 GMT

In response to my recent post about the updated guidelines for Windows disk timeouts, the Exchange Server team has released updated guidance on disk timeout settings with Exchange Server deployments. The article, titled “Windows Disk Timeouts and Exchange Server 2010” is available here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/11/17/windows-disk-timeouts-and-exchange-server-2010.aspx

Thanks,

Bruce

Windows Server 8: Standards-Based Storage Management

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:13:00 GMT

Jeffrey Snover has posted a great blog here about what is coming in Storage Management:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/10/14/windows-server-8-standards-based-storage-management.aspx

Using PowerShell to collect information for Storage Troubleshooting (Part 2: Performance Counters)

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 22:59:00 GMT

This is the second in a series of posts on how to utilize PowerShell to easily collect system information useful for troubleshooting Storage issues.

Note: In a later installment of this series, I’ll be showing how to utilize the information gathered in these scripts for troubleshooting some common storage issues.

In my first installment, I covered the collection of currently installed Hotfixes, and collection of specific system events related to storage. You can find the first installment here:

Storage Troubleshooting Part 1: Hotfixes and System Events

One troubleshooting step which typically comes into play with troubleshooting storage performance is collecting Performance Monitor (Perfmon) logs to assess the current system state, and look for causes of slow performance, such as lack of available memory, or excessive disk queue length.

Setting up a Perfmon log to capture information takes time and expertise for review, and I wanted a way to take a quick peek at the system to see if such an effort was needed. For example, if file copies seem “slow” and I were to look at the current Disk Queue length, it could tell me whether the perceived slowness is time spent waiting on the disk to do work.

Once you figure out how to access performance counters through PowerShell (which isn’t a lot of fun), it’s actually easy to use them to view information.

What I mean by this, is that finding them is hard, but using them is easy

Displaying Performance Counter Information:

In order to look at a specific counter, you need the path and name of the counter. For example, if I wanted to display the current Disk Queue Length for all disks, the following query in PowerShell would display this:

(Get-Counter "\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Current Disk Queue Length").Countersamples

Which displays output, similar to the following:

Path                                                        InstanceName CookedValue
----                                                        ------------ -----------
\\bman-pc\physicaldisk(0 c:) \current disk queue length         0 c:            0
\\bman-pc\physicaldisk(1 f:) \current disk queue length         1 f:            0
\\bman-pc\physicaldisk(2 i:) \current disk queue length         2 i:            0
\\bman-pc\physicaldisk(_total)\current disk queue length       _total            0

This can even be combined with the use of Where-Object to filter the results. For example, using the output above as a guide, if I only wished to display these counters for the C volume, I would use the following command to specify that I want only the instance name for Disk 0.

((Get-Counter "\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Current Disk Queue Length" ).Countersamples | ? {$_.InstanceName -eq "0 c:"})

Accessing the list of available counter paths

This is cool, but only of limited use unless you know how to find the path and name needed for accessing the counters. This is done by storing the output of Get-Counter in a variable, and then looking at the paths property. For example, if I wished to list all of the counters available on the Disk object, I would use the following Query:

$PhysCounter = get-counter -ListSet PhysicalDisk
$PhysCounter.Paths

Which yields the following list of paths exposed by this object which may be queried:

\PhysicalDisk(*)\Current Disk Queue Length
\PhysicalDisk(*)\% Disk Time
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Queue Length
\PhysicalDisk(*)\% Disk Read Time
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Read Queue Length
\PhysicalDisk(*)\% Disk Write Time
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Write Queue Length
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Transfer
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Read
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Write
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Disk Transfers/sec
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Disk Reads/sec
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Disk Writes/sec
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Disk Bytes/sec
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Disk Read Bytes/sec
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Disk Write Bytes/sec
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Bytes/Transfer
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Bytes/Read
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Bytes/Write
\PhysicalDisk(*)\% Idle Time
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Split IO/Sec

Prefixing this with the computer name is all that is needed to use this to collect information from the counters.

PowerShell sample script

In the sample below, I’ve taken this a bit further, and create a table for each of the counter sets. There are example outputs below, followed by the script sample itself.

Example of Disk counters output:

Example of Processor counters output:

Example of Memory counters output:

Note: The script below can also be downloaded from the Microsoft Script Repository on Technet at the following link:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/StoragePerfCounters-ec8f6c8f

#=================================================================================
# Created with: SAPIEN Technologies, Inc., PrimalForms 2011 v2.0.11
# Created on:   8/14/2011 7:16 PM
# Created by:   Bruce Langworthy
# Organization: Microsoft Corporation
# Filename: StoragePerformanceCounters.PS1
#=================================================================================
# Note: The performance information displayed by these counters are the
#       current values only, they do not show trends. This information
#       should be used as a measurement only of the current system state.
#=================================================================================

#   Retrieve the current Disk performance counter information.
$computer         = $ENV:Computername
$instance         = "_total"

@("\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Current Disk Queue Length",
"\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\% Disk Time",
"\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Queue Length",
"\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Read Queue Length",
"\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Write Queue Length",
"\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Transfer"
"\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Read",
"\\$Computer\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Write") |% {
    (Get-Counter $_.replace("*",$instance)).CounterSamples } |
    Select-Object Path,CookedValue |
    Format-Table -AutoSize

#   Retrieve the current Processor performance counter information.
$computer         = $ENV:Computername
$instance         = "_total"
@("\\$Computer\Processor(*)\% Processor Time",
"\\$Computer\Processor(*)\% User Time",
"\\$Computer\Processor(*)\% Privileged Time",
"\\$Computer\Processor(*)\Interrupts/sec",
"\\$Computer\Processor(*)\% DPC Time",
"\\$Computer\Processor(*)\DPCs Queued/sec"
"\\$Computer\Processor(*)\% Idle Time",
"\\$Computer\Processor(*)\% Interrupt Time") |% {
    (Get-Counter $_.replace("*",$instance)).CounterSamples } |
    Select-Object Path,CookedValue |
    Format-Table -AutoSize

# Retreive the current Memory counter information
$computer         = $ENV:Computername
$instance         = "_total"
@("\\$Computer\Memory\Page Faults/sec",
"\\$Computer\Memory\Available Bytes",
"\\$Computer\Memory\Committed Bytes",
"\\$Computer\Memory\Commit Limit",
"\\$Computer\Memory\Pages/sec",
"\\$Computer\Memory\Free System Page Table Entries"
"\\$Computer\Memory\Pool Paged Resident Bytes",
"\\$Computer\Memory\Available MBytes") |% {
    (Get-Counter $_.replace("*",$instance)).CounterSamples } |
    Select-Object Path,CookedValue |
    Format-Table -AutoSize

#================================================================================================
#The following examples shows how to list the available paths to query for several counter sets
#================================================================================================
$PhysCounter = get-counter -ListSet PhysicalDisk
$PhysCounter.Paths

#Memory Counters
$MemCounter   = get-counter -ListSet Memory
$MemCounter.Paths

#CPU Counters
$CpuCounter   = get-counter -ListSet Processor
$CpuCounter.Paths

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FAQ: Storage Reference pages for Developers

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 04:15:46 GMT

Since the information on TechNet and MSDN can unfortunately be quite spread out, I wanted to post this consolidated list of resources for Storage driver developers, to keep this in one location.

Storage Devices Reference on MSDN

The section includes references on the following Storage related items:

Storage Routines
Storage Structures and Enumerations
I/O Requests for Mass Storage Drivers
Storage WMI classes for management

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff566970(v=VS.85).aspx

Storage Samples:

Samples for the following driver types are available:

AddFilter
CDROM Class Driver
Common Library for Storage Class Drivers
Disk Class Driver
DiskPerf filter driver
flpyDisk
Pciide
SCSI Pass Through Interface
Sfloppy
Storage SDIO Driver Sample
iSCSI WMI Sample
MPIO DSM Sample
Storport Example Driver

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff567002(v=VS.85).aspx

Design Guides:

Design guides for the following driver types are also available:

Storage Drivers
Storage Class Drivers
Storage Port Drivers
Storage Miniport Drivers
Storage Virtual Miniport Drivers
Storage Filter Drivers
Storage Silo Drivers
Crash Dump Filter Drivers
CD-Rom Drivers
Tape Drivers
Changer Drivers

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff566969(v=VS.85).aspx

The Windows Disk timeout value: Less is better

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 02:30:00 GMT

Updated: 6/7/2012

As a result of some internal discussions around this, I decided that a blog post was long overdue on this topic, as the ramifications of setting the timeout value for Disk.sys are not commonly understood completely, and can lead to long recovery times in enterprise environments.

The Windows Disk timeout is stored in the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk\

For example, most array vendors will set this value to (at least) 60 seconds. This means, for all intents and purposes, that Windows will not report any problems with timeouts until at least 60 seconds have passed.

If for some reason, the Fibre Channel frame in question was dropped ,this is further exaggerated by the fact that after this timeout is hit, the Disk / Class layer will retry the I/O operation 8 times at the interval of the timeout for disk.sys, and during this time, since Windows is waiting for the SAN to return data, the operating system may appear to be frozen, depending on what the data was.

This means that with the value of 60 seconds, the effective impact to the user is the following:

I/O Timeouts will not be exposed in the Windows Event log until after 60 seconds AND the timeouts have expired, so effectively, this translates to an 8 minute delay before the I/O is retried.

While there is not any single rule which will apply equally to everyone in this case, I think most people would agree that waiting 8 minutes is far too long.

Going forward, Microsoft is recommending that the Disk timeout value be set as low as possible, and no greater than 20 to 30 seconds at a maximum. In this way, you can decrease the time to recovery on dropped I/O packets.

Why not just set it to 1 second? I don’t want to wait that long:

Keep in mind that the disk.sys timeout value is a global setting. If you were to set it to 1 second, this would mean that it would also have the effect of allowing only 1 second to spin up a drive which is asleep before reporting a timeout on the device.

It’s also important that this value be set high enough when using systems which are not only using SAN storage. For example, if you were to set the timeout value to 5 seconds on Windows Client operating systems where a SAN is not connected, you would likely see timeout errors which were not actually a problem, such as when a DVD or local disk are spinning up after being asleep. A good starting point to consider using is a value between 10 and 30 seconds.

Clearly, the need for a reasonable value is key, however we would strongly recommend that this be no more than 30 seconds going forward. As with any other change, this is something that should be evaluated for impact in a test environment prior to implementing this in a production environment.

What are the key things to consider when setting the disk timeout value?

The greater this value, the longer it will be before any timeout errors are surfaced by Windows. We would in general recommend setting this value low enough to meet any required SLA’s on the storage, rather than setting it too high.

To drive this point a little further, let’s review a potential scenario:

Let’s say that I have a SQL Server deployment, and my primary concern is fast I/O to the SQL database. SQL in general requires very short delays on I/O responses, and delays can translate to a delay in client applications built on top of SQL.

In fact SQL Server will generate an Application event any time an I/O takes longer than 15 seconds.

The problem with this approach, is that using the default value of 60 (or more) seconds employed by most array vendors, would prevent you from seeing any System events related to I/O timeouts unless the timeouts are for longer than 60 seconds.

This can make troubleshooting extremely difficult, because on one hand you would have a SQL client application acting slow, and SQL reporting slow I/O, at the same time that there are no events from Windows.

To ensure that these additional system events required for troubleshooting are not lost you would likely want to find a timeout closer to a maximum of 15 seconds that still works well under production workloads without generating excessive event log noise.

If you are using Fibre Channel-based storage, any occurrence of a dropped FC frame will cause all I/O to halt until recovery occurs, or until Storport has exceeded its 8 retry attempts at intervals of the Disk timeout.

So as I mentioned previously, 60 seconds will likely be far too long in this case, as it would translate to a 8 minute outage on a dropped frame.

More Information

Even if you are not using Fibre Channel storage, in most cases, a disk timeout value of 60 seconds would be too long, as it would mask timeout errors far beyond the point where a user could perceive slow access to data.

When troubleshooting issues with storage performance, it may be beneficial to set this slightly lower than normal to increase the chances of catching timeout errors.

Additional Resources

I have received some questions on what timeout values exist for both iSCSI and MPIO. These are documented in their respective users guides. I’m including links to these documents below:

iSCSI Initiator Users Guide

MPIO Users Guide

Using PowerShell to collect information for Storage Troubleshooting (Part 1: Hotfixes and System Events)

Bruce Langworthy - MSFT — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:58:58 GMT

This will be part of a series of posts on how to utilize PowerShell to easily collect system information useful for troubleshooting Storage issues.

In my first installment, we will cover the collection of currently installed Hotfixes, and collection of specific system events related to storage.

Collecting a list of installed hotfixes:

The following code sample produces a list of the installed hotfixes on the system, sorted in descending order, which can be useful when looking for a specific hotfix, or when performing configuration monitoring.

(Get-HotFix | Select HotfixID, Description, InstalledBy, InstalledOn | 
Sort-Object -Property InstalledOn -Descending)

Sample hotfix output:

Note: In sample output, some text may have been omitted to improve readability. To get the complete output, you can omit the Select filter, and combine it with piping to Out-File to save as a file.

HotfixID                          Description                      InstalledBy                    InstalledOn          
--------                         -----------                      -----------                     -----------          
KB2539635                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2562937                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2559049                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2536276                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2556532                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2567680                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2560656                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2563894                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2563227                        Update                           NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2555917                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             7/14/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2529073                        Update                           NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             7/14/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2507938                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             7/14/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2533623                        Update                           NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             7/14/2011 12:00:00 AM
KB2532531                        Security Update                  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM             7/14/2011 12:00:00 AM

Collecting system events for a specific source

First, I would recommend storing the system log in a PowerShell variable when intending to query multiple event log sources. Querying the log can be a very slow process, and by storing it in a variable, you can avoid repeating the delay for collection of the system log.

# Store the current System log in the variable TempSystemLog 
$TempSystemLog = (Get-WinEvent -LogName System)              
#                                                            
# Then pipe the variable to the appropriate filter           
($TempSystemLog | ? {$_.ProviderName -eq "NTFS"   })         
($TempSystemLog | ? {$_.ProviderName -eq "Volsnap"})         
($TempSystemLog | ? {$_.ProviderName -eq "Disk"   })

Hint: If you add “FT –Autosize” it will display more of the message text on the screen, such as is highlighted below:

($TempSystemLog | Where-object {$_.ProviderName -eq "Disk" | FT –Autosize)

The commands above produce separate lists of all NTFS events, all Volsnap events, and all Disk events.

Sample Outputs:

NTFS Events:

TimeCreated           ProviderName  Id Message
-----------           ------------  -- -------
6/10/2011 5:19:42 AM  Ntfs          57 The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.
6/10/2011 5:19:42 AM  Ntfs          57 The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.
6/10/2011 5:19:42 AM  Ntfs          57 The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.
6/10/2011 5:19:41 AM  Ntfs          57 The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

Volsnap Events:

TimeCreated           ProviderName Id Message
-----------           ------------ -- -------
8/11/2011 7:42:50 AM  volsnap      36 The shadow copies of volume F: were aborted because the shadow copy storage  …
8/11/2011 7:40:21 AM  volsnap      33 The oldest shadow copy of volume F: was deleted to keep disk space usage for …
8/11/2011 7:39:40 AM  volsnap      33 The oldest shadow copy of volume F: was deleted to keep disk space usage for …

Disk Events:
TimeCreated          ProviderName Id Message
-----------          ------------ -- -------
8/1/2011 9:18:45 PM  Disk         11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3\DR3.                
7/4/2011 6:55:49 PM  Disk         11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR2.                
7/4/2011 6:55:49 PM  Disk         11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR2.                
7/4/2011 6:55:48 PM  Disk         11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR2.                
7/4/2011 6:55:48 PM  Disk         11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR2.                
7/4/2011 6:55:47 PM  Disk         11 The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR2.                
7/3/2011 10:44:49 AM Disk         51 An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk3\DR3 during a paging operation.
7/3/2011 10:44:45 AM Disk         51 An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk3\DR3 during a paging operation.
7/3/2011 10:44:45 AM Disk         51 An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk3\DR3 during a paging operation.
7/3/2011 10:44:45 AM Disk         51 An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk3\DR3 during a paging operation.
As can be seen in the combined sample, you can essentially query for any event source simply by modifying the provider name below by using the “Source” name in the event log you wish.

Additional Eventlog sources of interest:

Note: This section is not intended to be an exhaustive list, which I will add to as time allows.

For users of the iSCSI Initiator, the following events sources are interesting:
iSCSI
iSCSIPrt
MSiSCSI
For users of MPIO:
MPIO
MSDSM
Other Storage events of interest:
Partition Manager (partmgr)
Volume Manager (volmgr)
ClassPNP
Making the information returned more usable:

A great alternative to viewing these in the PowerShell console is to open them in GridView.

For example, to get a list of hotfixes in GridView, we’d type the following:

(Get-HotFix | Out-GridView)

Which yields a tabular GUI, which supports search criteria and sorting of data.

Example of Gridview output:

Note I’ve selected only specific properties for the example

To download a copy of this example, please see my posting in the script center here:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Collect-System-Events-5c0fbe7f

Combined PowerShell Sample:

##############################################################################
# Created by:   Bruce Langworthy
# Organization: Microsoft Corporation
# Sample Name: StorageEvents.ps1
##############################################################################
# Note: This is intended primarily as an example of how to collect specific
#        event types, as it will typically return too many events to be easily
#       usable at the PowerShell prompt.
#
#       I would suggest combining them either with Out-Gridview, or Out-File.
#       For example,
#       $TempSystemLog | Where-object {$_.ProviderName -eq "NTFS"} | Out-Gridview
#       $TempSystemLog | Where-object {$_.ProviderName -eq "NTFS"} | Out-File
#
##############################################################################

# Get the list of installed hotfixes, and sort them my descending installation date
    (Get-HotFix | Select HotfixID, Description, InstalledBy, InstalledOn |
     Sort-Object -Property InstalledOn -Descending)

# Store system log, because this query is horribly time consuming
    $TempSystemLog = (Get-WinEvent -LogName System)

# Obtain and display NTFS Events.
    $TempSystemLog | Where-object {$_.ProviderName -eq "NTFS"}

# Obtain and display Volsnap events
    $TempSystemLog | Where-object {$_.ProviderName -eq "Volsnap"}

# Obtain and display Disk Events
$TempSystemLog | Where-object {$_.ProviderName -eq "Disk"}

Windows Storage Team

Two new modules related to Storage Spaces for Windows PowerShell

Creating a Bootable USB Disk on Windows 8 for deploying Windows

My scenario for this post is the following;

Prior method using DiskPart.exe

Using Windows PowerShell to achieve this scenario using Windows 8:

Determining disk health using Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

More Information:

Information for Drive Manufacturers:

ISO Mounting Scenarios

Updated : MPIO Guide for DSM Developers

Users Guide for MPIO on Windows Server 2012

Managing iSCSI Initiator connections with Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012

Managing iSCSI Initiator Connections

Background:

Prerequisites

To list available firewall rules related to the MSiSCSI Service, use the following command:

Connecting to a new iSCSI Target

Creating a new iSCSI Target Portal

Viewing available iSCSI Targets

Connecting to available iSCSI Targets

Listing iSCSI Connections and sessions:

To view iSCSI Connections:

To View iSCSI Sessions:

To list all Windows disks for a specific iSCSI session:

Listing the iSCSI IQN for the iSCSI Initiator

Configuring sessions to persist across reboots:

Connecting to an iSCSI Target when using CHAP Secrets

Advanced Configuration Management: Using MPIO with iSCSI Connections.

Tip: List your IPv4 addresses using the Get-NetIPAddress cmdlet

Configuring MPIO to automatically claim devices:

Connecting with MPIO and iSCSI using multiple Network adapters

Viewing connections to determine which Network Adapter is used

Viewing advanced properties for a disk which is connected via iSCSI:

Additional References:

Complete list of cmdlets in the iSCSI module:

Managing MPIO with Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012

Listing commands available in the MPIO module: The commands available in the MPIO module can be listed using get-command as shown below

Script Example: Configuring MPIO using PowerShell:

Additional References:

Managing Storage with Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012

Managing local Windows Storage

Disk

Listing all disks in the system

Listing only the system disk or all disks except the system disk

Listing all disks for a specific storage bus

Clearing all of the partitions and volumes from a disk

Initializing a disk

Listing all disks that are offline

Bringing all offline disks online

Partition

Listing all of the partitions on all disks

Listing all of the partitions on a specific disk

Creating a new partition on a new disk

Volume

Listing all volumes

Listing the volume for a specific drive letter

Formatting a volume

Storage Settings object

Viewing the new disk policy

Set the NewDiskPolicy

Combined Example: Format a New Disk

Introduction to Storage Management on Windows Server 2012 (Part 2)

Understanding Custom object views in the Storage Module for Windows PowerShell

Available Windows PowerShell modules related to managing Storage

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

TechEd video on Standards Support and Storage Management for Windows Server 2012

An Introduction to Storage Management in Windows Server 2012

Introducing the Windows Storage Management API (SMAPI)

High Level Architecture overview:

More Information:

Deploy and Manage Storage Spaces using PowerShell: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2012/06/12/managing-storage-spaces-using-powershell-whitepaper-is-now-available.aspx

For a list of the cmdlets contained in the Storage module, refer to the following topic on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx

Introduction to SMI-S http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/06/25/introduction-to-smi-s.aspx

An Introduction to SMI-S

Managing Storage Spaces using PowerShell Whitepaper is now available

Analyzing Storage Performance using the Windows Performance Analysis Toolkit (WPT)

Links to Storage resources for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Storage Management PowerShell cmdlets http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx

iSCSI Initiator PowerShell cmdlets http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826099.aspx

Listing commands available in the MPIO module:
The commands available in the MPIO module can be listed using get-command as shown below

Deploy and Manage Storage Spaces using PowerShell:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/san/archive/2012/06/12/managing-storage-spaces-using-powershell-whitepaper-is-now-available.aspx

For a list of the cmdlets contained in the Storage module, refer to the following topic on TechNet:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx

Introduction to SMI-S
http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/06/25/introduction-to-smi-s.aspx

Storage Management PowerShell cmdlets
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx

iSCSI Initiator PowerShell cmdlets
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826099.aspx

MPIO PowerShell cmdlets (Windows 8 Server Preview only)
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh826113.aspx

Windows PowerShell Reference Sheet for File and Storage Services in Windows Server “8” Beta
http://blogs.technet.com/b/roiyz/archive/2012/03/06/windows-powershell-reference-sheet-for-file-and-storage-services-in-windows-server-8-beta.aspx?Redirected=true

Storage Management API – WMI v2 Classes
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh830612(v=vs.85).aspx

Storage Management WMI Application Sample
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Storage-management-ddef6afc