Assignment 4 – Server Storage

Question 1

1. What is the difference between a partition and a volume with respect to hard disk storage?

Answer 1

A partition is a logical division of a storage space.

A volume is a single storage area that has a file system installed and may span multiple partitions.

Question 2

2. What are the two disk storage partitioning formats supported by Windows Server 2016?

Answer 2

You can use either Master Boot Record (MBR) or Grid Partition Table (GPT) for partitions.

Question 3

3. What is the main limitation of using MBR?

Answer 3

MBR uses the first 512 bytes of the drive allowing only 4 standard partitions limited to 2TB in size.

Question 4

4. What is the main limitation of using GPT with an older BIOS?

Answer 4

GPT may not be supported because it requires UEFI support for bootable partitions.

Question 5

FAT32

Answer 5

– compatible with older OSs, 2 TB maximum partition size, no encryption, compression, or quota support.

Question 6

NTFS –

Answer 6

256 TB partition size, supports encryption, compression, and quotas

Question 7

ReFS –

Answer 7

1 yobibyte partition size, supports encryption, compression, and quotas

Question 8

7. What are the two volume disk types available?

Answer 8

You can have basic or dynamic disk types. The default is basic.

Question 9

8. When would you want to create a dynamic volume?

Answer 9

Use dynamic volumes to allows advanced disk management options such as spanning and RAID options with volumes.

Question 10

9. What are five volume types that can be created with dynamic volumes?

Answer 10

Dynamic volumes support 
Simple, 
Spannned, 
Striped (RAID0), 
Mirrored (RAID1),
Striped with Parity (RAID5).

Question 11

10. What is the Windows Server tool commonly used to manage disk storage?
    .

Answer 11

The common tool used to manage disk storage is Disk Management through the Administrative tools menu

Question 12

11. What is the command line command commonly used to manage disk storage?

Answer 12

Use the DISKPART command line tool for managing disk storage.

Question 13

12. What is a VHD?

Answer 13

A VHD is a virtual hard disk that uses a file to emulate a physical storage device.

Question 14

13. What two types of VHDs are available? What is the advantage of one over the other?

Answer 14

Two types of VHDs are fixed or dynamically expanding.
A fixed disk is set to a maximum size and uses that size regardless of how much information is stored there.
A dynamically expanding disk has a maximum size, but only uses the amount of space required by the files stored there. It will grow as the number of files increases to the maximum size therefore saving space.

Question 15

15. What is a storage pool?

Answer 15

A storage pool is a collection of space from multiple disk drives or other storage devices.

Question 16

16. Where are storage pools created in Windows Server 2016?

Answer 16

Storage pools are created in the File and Storage Services role.

Question 17

17. Why are storage pools a better choice than managing disk configurations with Disk Management?

Answer 17

Storage pools make much better use of the disk space as there are no physical boundaries based on individual disks and allow for extra disks to be added dynamically to increase the storage space.

Question 18

18. What properties of a hard disk are necessary to become part of a storage pool?

Answer 18

A hard disk must be online and unallocated (no partitions or format) to be added to a storage pool.

Question 19

19. What are some of the limitations of using storage pools?

Answer 19

Disks that have a boot volume, system partition, or is a Cluster Shared Volume cannot be added to the storage pool. Individual drives must be at least 10GB in size. Any storage pools that use Fibre Channel or iSCSI cannot be used as failover clusters.

Question 20

20. What is ‘Enclosure Awareness’?

Answer 20

Enclosure Awareness provides a level of fault tolerance by mirroring data between two or more enclosures. If one enclosure fails, then data can be recovered from another enclosure.

Question 21

21. What are the differences between a server that uses DAS (directly attached storage) versus a SAN (storage area network) to create network shares for data?

Answer 21

Directly attached Storage represents any physical drives attached to the actual server machine used as data stores. Relatively cheap to implement, but represents a single point of failure.

A Storage Area Network represents storage that is accessed through multiple servers. This eliminates a single point of failure should one server fail. SANs have their own network connection to the servers to maximize throughput.

Question 22

22. What are two options for creating a SAN?

Answer 22

Two options for creating a SAN are using Fibre Channel or iSCSI.

Question 23

23. Describe the characteristics of iSCSI.

Answer 23

iSCSI is a network protocol that encapsulates SCSI block-level commands within IP packets over an Ethernet network. Basically iSCSI allows for data storage using TCP/IP over Ethernet. iSCSI storage devices are called targets. iSCSI servers use initiators to connect to and communicate with an iSCSI target. Typically multiple servers are used to connect to the iSCSI targets to allow for performance and redundancy of data storage. iSCSI should have its own network connection.

Question 24

24. What is the principle behind ‘Data Deduplication’?

Answer 24

Data Deduplication is an option for optimizing disk storage by locating common data chunks and maintaining only one copy of those common data chunks. The data chunks are compressed and organized into special container files in the System Volume Information folder.