Creating clustered storage spaces a lot faster

The process for creating a new clustered space includes a fair amount of single steps to be processed in the right order, no matter if you use the Server Manager GUI or PowerShell.

• creating the virtual disk
• partitioning and formatting the virtual disk
• adding the virtual disk to the cluster
• converting it into CSVFS

The Powershell cmdlet New-Volume has been introduced with Server 2012 R2. It significantly simplifies the process of creating a new clustered space by combining the steps above into a single cmdlet. The following example shows how easy it is using this cmdlet.

#Creating new clustered space
New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName vdisk1 -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 3 -FileSystem CSVFS_NTFS  -NumberOfColumns 4 -ResiliencySettingName Mirror -Size 1TB

The next examples creates a new tiered, clustered space

#Creating new clustered space
$ssd_tier = Get-StoragePool -FriendlyName Pool1 | get-StorageTier | where {$_.Mediatype -eq 'SSD'}
$hdd_tier = Get-StoragePool -FriendlyName Pool1 | get-StorageTier | where {$_.Mediatype -eq 'HDD'}
New-Volume -StoragePoolFriendlyName Pool1 -FriendlyName vdisk1_tiered -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 3 -FileSystem CSVFS_NTFS  -NumberOfColumns 4 -ResiliencySettingName Mirror -StorageTiers $ssd_tier, $hdd_tier -StorageTierSizes 200GB,1TB