So as we discovered a straight parity space with NVMe cache wasn’t going to work. Just straight up, it wasn’t going to happen. The performance was abysmal, and I couldn’t deal. I decided I would spend today getting a tiered parity space working, and in the quest to make sure that all my storage tiers could survive a failure, I went out and purchased 2 Samsung 850 Evo drives. So now I have a NVMe+SSD+HDD Tiered storage.
In case someone from the googleverse finds this in searching for exactly what I did, here is start to finish your copy/paste powershell guide for getting this working.
First create your storage pool. Few things to note. -LogicalSectorSizeDefault 512 is needed to ensure that you have a 512e disk Explained Here -FaultDomainAwarenessDefault PhysicalDisk is necessasary to later to prevent an error in creating the Volume.
New-StoragePool -StoragePoolFriendlyName "Pool1" -StorageSubSystemFriendlyName (Get-StorageSubSystem).FriendlyName -PhysicalDisks (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true) -LogicalSectorSizeDefault 512 -FaultDomainAwarenessDefault PhysicalDisk
Next we set the resiliency settings. Not something you should have to do, but I kept running into an error, so better safe than sorry. Note that you should change your parity Columns to match the number of drives you have in that tier (up to 8).
Get-Storagepool Pool1 | Set-ResiliencySetting -Name Mirror -NumberOfColumnsDefault 1
Get-Storagepool Pool1 | Set-ResiliencySetting -Name Parity -NumberOfColumnsDefault 3
Now we create our storage tiers. One SSD, one HDD.
New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName SSDTier -MediaType SSD -ResiliencySettingName Mirror -NumberOfColumns 1 -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 1 -FaultDomainAwareness PhysicalDisk
New-StorageTier -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName HDDTier -MediaType HDD -ResiliencySettingName Parity -NumberOfColumns 3 -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 1 -FaultDomainAwareness PhysicalDisk
Let us now actually create our Volume! Because this is a tiered volume we want to use ReFS.
New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName VM -FileSystem ReFS -StorageTierFriendlyName SSDTier, HDDTier -StorageTierSizes 200GB, 3.5TB
Vola! We have a Volume! Now let’s make sure that it actually formatted properly.
Get-StorageTier | FT FriendlyName, ResiliencySettingName, PhysicalDiskRedundancy, FaultDomainAwareness, NumberOfDataCopies
This returns
FriendlyName ResiliencySettingName PhysicalDiskRedundancy FaultDomainAwareness NumberOfDataCopies
------------ --------------------- ---------------------- -------------------- ------------------
SSDTier Mirror 1 PhysicalDisk 2
VM_HDDTier Parity 1 PhysicalDisk 1
HDDTier Parity 1 PhysicalDisk 1
VM_SSDTier Mirror 1 PhysicalDisk 2
Excellent! But I know that I still have space. So how do we expand?
Resize-StorageTier -InputObject (Get-StorageTier -FriendlyName "VM_HDDTier") -Size 3.6TB
And lastly since I am actually on a UPS we run this.
Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName Pool1 -IsPowerProtected $True
So there you have it. I now have a 3 tiered setup on a single host. Adding drives to the Parity tier is pretty easy, as is expanding the capacity.
ScreenShot Proof!
And now the performance figures.
CPU and Disk in VM
CPU and Disk from the hypervisor OS
I am now seeing writes in the 170MBps, however there is a good amount of latency inside the VM. That being said, there is no longer crazy latency at the hpyervisor level, and I will definitely take the increase in sustained write.
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So as we discovered a straight parity space with NVMe cache wasn’t going to work. Just straight up, it wasn’t going to happen. The performance was abysmal, and I couldn’t deal. I decided I would spend today getting a tiered parity space working, and in the quest to make sure that all my storage tiers could survive a failure, I went out and purchased 2 Samsung 850 Evo drives. So now I have a NVMe+SSD+HDD Tiered storage.
In case someone from the googleverse finds this in searching for exactly what I did, here is start to finish your copy/paste powershell guide for getting this working.
First create your storage pool. Few things to note. -LogicalSectorSizeDefault 512 is needed to ensure that you have a 512e disk Explained Here -FaultDomainAwarenessDefault PhysicalDisk is necessasary to later to prevent an error in creating the Volume.
Next we set the resiliency settings. Not something you should have to do, but I kept running into an error, so better safe than sorry. Note that you should change your parity Columns to match the number of drives you have in that tier (up to 8).
Now we create our storage tiers. One SSD, one HDD.
Let us now actually create our Volume! Because this is a tiered volume we want to use ReFS.
Vola! We have a Volume! Now let’s make sure that it actually formatted properly.
This returns
Excellent! But I know that I still have space. So how do we expand?
And lastly since I am actually on a UPS we run this.
So there you have it. I now have a 3 tiered setup on a single host. Adding drives to the Parity tier is pretty easy, as is expanding the capacity.
ScreenShot Proof!
And now the performance figures.
CPU and Disk in VM
CPU and Disk from the hypervisor OS
I am now seeing writes in the 170MBps, however there is a good amount of latency inside the VM. That being said, there is no longer crazy latency at the hpyervisor level, and I will definitely take the increase in sustained write.
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