Tag Archives: Storage Spaces

vSphere: Presenting Physical Disks to a VM

Posted on by
Reply

KB ID 0001563

Problem

I’m doing some work presenting StarWind vSAN into VMware ESX. Because we also want ‘disk tiering’ it has to be ran from Microsoft Windows with Storage Spaces*. To do that I needed to present the physical disks in the ESX hosts, (HP DL380 Gen 10s) to the Windows Virtual Machines that StarWind will be running on.

*Note: At present, ‘tiering’ cannot be done from the StarWind Linux appliance.

Solution

I approached this problem ‘assuming‘ I needed to give the VM the physical RAID controller in the physical server (of which there are two, one for the SSDs and one for the HDDs. But that’s not the case at all, I realised this when I needed to create a datastore on the host itself, and could see all the individual disks.

Shut Down, then edit the settings of the VM > ADD NEW DEVICE > RDM Disk.

Select and add each Physical disk one at a time.

With all the disks presented you can power on the virtual machine.

You will see all the disk(s) listed under the VMs summary hardware section.

The disk should be available within Windows, to add to a storage pool.

Note: If some of the drives cannot be added, see the following article;

Windows Disks ‘CanPool’ set False?

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

NA

The Storage Pool Does Not Have Sufficient Eligible Resources

Posted on by
Reply

KB ID 0001562

Problem

When attempting to  create a vDisk in Tiered Windows Storage Spaces you see this;

Failed to create virtual disk – Not Supported

Extended Information:
The storage pool does not have sufficient eligible resources for the creation of the specified virtual disk.

Recommended Actions:
-Choose a combination of FaultDomainAwareness and NumberOfDataCopies (or PhysicalDiskRedundancy) supported by the storage pool.
-Choose a value for number of columns that is less than or equal to the number of physical disks in the storage fault domain selected for the virtual disk.

Of if you are using PowerShell, the error will look more like this;

Solution

I’ve seen the same error when trying to create a disk from a pool that has 1 SSD, and 1 HDD, and also from a pool with many SSD’s and HDD’s. Ive seen it with both ‘Simple’ and ‘Mirrored’ storage.

Recreate the vDisk, but this time DONT use ‘Maximum Size’, drop the Tier sizes, like so.

OK, this is a bit hit and miss ‘I grant you,‘ but, you will need to experiment with the sizes. As a ‘rule of thumb’ aim to lose about 4GB per physical disk. Annoyingly you will need to delete the vDisk and keep retrying (so don’t put a volume on it just yet, or you will have to go to Computer Management and delete that every time!) until you get the size optimal.

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

NA

Windows Disks ‘CanPool’ set False?

Posted on by
3

KB ID 0001560

Problem

While attempting to create some Storage Spaces in Server 2016 today, I presented a bunch of ‘new’ disks and some of them were flagged CanPool as false?

CanPool simply means the disk it available to be added to a storage pool, Id just removed all the arrays from these drives so I was confused?

Solution

Just because we’re on Powershell does not mean I can’t go old school! Launch Diskpart and list disk. You can see some of the drives (the ones I’m having trouble with have a partition on them, the asterisk in the GPT (GUID Partition Table) column gives that away? 

WARNING: I know the drives, (apart from the 100GB one,) SHOULD be blank, and I know I can erase them safely, MAKE SURE the disk(s) you are looking at are not in use, and do not have important data on them!

To clean/erase

[box]

select disk {x}
online disk
clean
offline disk

[/box]

If it tells you;

Diskpart has encountered an error: The media is wrote protected.
See the system event log for more information

[box]

attributes disk clear readonly
clean
offline disk

[/box]

Note: In some cases I’ve had to physically reboot the server, before all the disks were CanPool = True.

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

NA