The concept of a network attached storage (NAS) solution is that it is a low-c ost device for storing data and serving files through the use of an Ethernet LAN connection. A NAS device accesses data at the file level via a communication protocol such as NFS, CIFS, or even HTTP, which is different from iSCSI or FC Fibre Channel storage devices that access the data at the block level. NAS devices are best used in file- storing applications, and they do not require a storage expert to install and maintain the device. In most cases, the only setup that is required is an IP address and an Ethernet connection.

Virtual Disk Service

Virtual Disk Service (VDS) was created to ease the administrative efforts involved in managing all of the various types of storage devices. Many storage hardware providers used their own applications for installation and management, and this made administering all of these various devices very cumbersome.

VDS is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that provides a centralized interface for managing all of the various storage devices. The native VDS API enables the management of disks and volumes at an OS level, and hardware vendor- supplied APIs manage the storage devices at a RAID level. These are known as software and hardware providers.

A software provider is host based, and it interacts with Plug and Play Manager because each disk is discovered and operates on volumes, disks, and disk partitions. VDS includes two software providers: basic and dynamic. The basic software provider manages basic disks with no fault tolerance, whereas the dynamic software providers manage dynamic disks with fault management. A hardware provider translates the VDS APIs into instructions specific to the storage hardware. This is how storage management applications are able to communicate with the storage hardware to create LUNs or Fibre Channel HBAs to view the WWN. The following are Windows Server 2022 storage management applications that use VDS:

■        The Disk Management snap- in is an application that allows you to configure and manage the disk drives on the host computer. You have already seen this application in use when you initialized disks and created volume sets.

■ DiskPart is a command- line utility that configures and manages disks, volumes, and partitions on the host computer. It can also be used to script many of the storage management commands. DiskPart is a robust tool that you should study on your own because it is beyond the scope of this book. Figure 11.8 shows the various commands and their function in the DiskPart utility.

■ DiskRAID is also a scriptable command- line utility that configures and manages hardware RAID storage systems. However, at least one VDS hardware provider must be installed for DiskRAID to be functional. DiskRAID is another useful utility that you should study on your own because it’s beyond the scope of this book.

Understanding Data Center Bridging

I think the easiest way to understanding Data Center Bridging (DCB) is to understand NIC bridging. Many of us who have used laptops have used both the Wireless and Wired networks at the same time. This is bridging network adapter cards to work as one. Well, Data Center Bridging is the same thing but just done on a larger scale.

FIGURE 11.8 DiskPart commands

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) created a suite of standards called Data Center Bridging. DCB allows the same ethernet infrastructure to work throughout the data center. This means that all of the network servers, clusters, and data center will share the same ethernet infrastructure. DCB works through the use of hardware based bandwidth allocation. This means that the hardware controls the flow of data through DCB.

DCB is nice because when you setup the hardware based flow control, you can determine which type of traffic gets a higher priority to the allocated bandwidth. This can be very useful for data that bypasses the operating system and accesses the network adapters directly (like virtualization can). DCB can work with different types of network adapters including Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet, Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), or Fiber Channel over Ethernet (fCoE).

The reason that the IEEE has developed the DCB standard is because many third party and hardware manufacturers do not work together well. By having an industry standard of hardware based flow control protocol, many IT data centers can use DCB to make different vendors work together. Also, Windows Server 2022 makes it very easy to deploy and manage DCB. There are a couple of requirements that are needed when deploying DCB through Windows Server 2022;

■        The Ethernet adapters installed into the Windows Server 2022 systems must be DCB compatible.

■        The Hardware switches that are deployed to your infrastructure must also be DCB compatible.

DCB can be installed onto a Windows Server two ways; through Server Manager or through PowerShell. Here are the steps for both ways.