Storage – Practical Exercises Overview This course comes with a virtual lab environment where you can practice what you learn. Launch the lab environment from the Welcome > Getting Started > Practice Lab Environment page. • You will only have four hours in the practical environment. • The time is cumulative, so you can work a little bit at a time until it adds up the total time allowed. • You may not have enough time to complete all the practical exercises. So, choose wisely. You may want to consider all the hand-on exercises and decide which ones you want to make sure you work on first. In most cases, the userid is Adatum\Administrator and the password is Pa55w.rd, but read the instructions carefully. If you are having difficulties with the lab environment check out the Student Lab Guide. This document is available from the Course Handouts page and includes basic troubleshooting and the support desk link. Recommendation: Bookmark the edX Practice Lab Environment page as you will return to it frequently to perform your hands-on labs! Notice in the lab environment you can copy information to the virtual machines by using the Actions > Paste Content window. Before you paste the content, be sure your cursor is where you want the copied data. Module 1 – Disks and Volumes Disk Structure In this exercise, you will bring disks online, initialize, format and partition. Disk Structure (Server Manager) 1. Login to LON-SVR1 as Administrator with the password Pa55w.rd. 2. In Server Manager, select Tools, and select Computer Management. 3. Access Disk Management. 4. Review the volume information such as: Type, File System, Status, Capacity, Free Space, and %Free. 5. Notice Disk2 and Disk3 have red x icons which indicates the disk if offline. 6. Right-click Disk2 (left side) and bring the disk Online. Notice the disk now says, Not Initialized. 7. Right-click Disk2 and select Initialize disk. 8. Notice your choices GPT and MBR. Select GPT (GUID Partition Table) which is not recognized by all previous versions of Windows. 9. Notice Disk2 is now a Basic Disk and that the space is unallocated. 10. Right-click the unallocated space and create a New Simple Volume with the following characteristics. When you are done, Finish creating the volume. • Volume size: 4000 MB • Drive Letter: F: • File system: NTFS (notice the other choices) • Volume label: NTFS 11. Notice there is still unallocated space in Disk2. 12. Open File Explorer, and format the drive. Notice the warning that all data will be erased. 13. Verify the NTFS (F:) is ready to use. Keep Computer Management open as you will use it in the next exercise. Disk Structure (PowerShell) 1. Open an Administrator Windows PowerShell prompt. 2. View information on all disks in the system. Take a minute to review what is presented. Notice the Number parameter. Get-Disk | Format-List 3. View information just about Disk 2. Verify this is your new 32 GB GPT formatted disk. Get-Disk –Number 2 | Format-List 4. View information about the partitions on Disk 2. Your new F: drive should be shown. Get-Disk –Number 2 | Get-Partition 5. View the help on the New-Partition command. Scroll through the parameters and review the associated syntax. If prompted, do not update the help files. Get-Help New-Partition –Showwindow 6. Use New-Partition to create a new partition on Disk 2. Use drive letter G, and use the maximum size available. New-Partition –DiskNumber 2 –UseMaximumSize –DriveLetter G 7. View the help on the Format-Volume command. Review the parameters and the syntax. Get-Help Format-Volume –Full 8. Use Format-Volume to format the G drive. If prompted, answer Yes to confirm you want to format the drive. Format-Volume –DriveLetter G 9. Return to Disk Management and verify the G drive is shown. If the drive is not shown, right-click Disk Management and then Rescan Disks. 10. Format the new volume, and assign a Volume label of HR to the drive. 11. Verify that Disk 2 now has two healthy partitions. Managing Volumes In this exercise, you will extend and shrink a volume. Extend a volume 1. Login to LON-SVR1 as Administrator with the password Pa55w.rd. 2. Access the Computer Management tool, and then select Disk Management. 3. In Disk 2, you assigned the G: drive to HR and they now need an additional 4 GB of space. Notice there is no more space on Disk 2. 4. Bring Disk 3 online and initialize the disk. Select GPT (GUID Partition Table). 5. Right-click the G: drive and notice your choices. Select Extend Volume. 6. Add Disk 3 with 4000 MB of space. 7. Read and accept the warning that the basic disks will be converted to dynamic disks and that dynamic disks cannot be boot disks. 8. Review the Disk Management information (you may need to Rescan the disks). Notice G: is now Spanned (Layout column) and Dynamic (Type column). 9. Open File Explorer and notice that even though G: spans two physical disks it still is accessed as a single entity G:. Shrink a volume 1. Right-click the G: volume on Disk2 and Shrink the volume. 2. Enter the amount to shrink in MB (2000). 3. Read the information that says you cannot shrink a volume beyond the point where any unmovable files are located. 4. After shrinking the volume notice both disks are still used. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) In this exercise, you will create and test a disk mirror. Create a disk mirror 1. Login to LON-SVR1 as Administrator with the password Pa55w.rd. 2. Open Disk Management. 3. Right-click on the Disk 2 F: and Add Mirror. The Add Mirror... option will be greyed out if there isn’t enough another disk online with available space. Make sure Disk 3 is online and there is available space. 4. Read that adding a mirror to an existing volume provides data redundancy by maintaining multiple copies of the data on different disks. 5. Select Disk3 as the mirror. 6. Watch the resynchronization operation as the mirror partition is created. This may take a couple of minutes depending on the size of the volume. 7. While you wait right-click one of the volumes and notice the options to: Remove Mirror... and Break Mirrored Volume... (one or both will be greyed out until the mirror is fully created and synchronized). 8. Notice in the Disk Management information (top pane), the F: drive layout is Mirror. Test the mirror 1. Switch to File Explorer. 2. If prompted format your disks. 3. Create a couple of test files on the F: drive. 4. In the Disk Management tool, right-click Disk 2 and take the disk Offline. Notice the change in icon and the Disk 2 information changing to Offline. 5. You will start to see Failed Redundancy errors on the disks. 6. Return to File Explorer and verify even with Disk 2 offline you can still access the test files on the F: drive. 7. Bring Disk 2 back online. Monitoring Disks In this exercise, you will use Performance Monitor, Task Manager, and Resource Monitor to view disk statistics. Performance Manager 1. Login to LON-SVR1 as Administrator with the password Pa55w.rd 2. From a command prompt type: perfmon. You can also get to the Performance Monitor from Server Manager Tools. 3. Expand Data Collector Sets, right-click on User Defined, select New, and then Data Collector Set. • Name: Disk Stats • Create from Template (Recommended) • Select each of the different templates and read about how they are used. • In the Template Data Collector Set list, select System Performance • Click Finish. 4. Right-click the Disk Stats data collector set and select Start. This will start a 60 second capture of what is happening on the machine. 5. Expand Reports, User Defined, and Disks Stats. 6. Double click your report starting with the <machine>_<date> prefix. 7. If your report is still collecting data, please wait. 8. In the Summary section check out the Disk information. 9. There is also a Physical Disk section that includes information about the physical disk: Physical Disk Counters, Physical Disk Percent Idle Time, and Physical Disk Average Second Counters. You can click on the Top Disk by IO Rate link in the Summary section to view this. 10. Take a few minutes to browse around the other areas of the report. 11. As you have time create a new User-Defined Data Collector Set. Choose Advanced instead of Recommended. Select the option for Performance Counter Alert and then select Add. Notice you can create a customized report by selecting individual performance counters. Task Manager 1. From a command prompt, type: taskmgr Notice on Windows Server systems only the CPU and Memory columns are present. If you run Task Manager on your Windows client you will also see Disk and Network information. 2. Select the Performance tab and then click on Open Resource Monitor. 3. Expand the Disk section and notice the column information for Process ID (PID), File, read (B/sec), Write (B/sec), Total (B/sec), I/O Priority, Response Time (ms). 4. Select an item and then click on the Monitor menu. Notice you can start and stop monitoring processes. 5. Click on the Disk tab and expand the Disk Activity and Storage sections. 6. In the Processes with Disk Activity section notice you can select individual processes. Right-click and notice the available options at the process level. Use Analyze Wait Chain to view processes waiting on another resource.