Ensuring Secure and Reliable Storage

I used to think file servers were boring until I learned about the new storage features and enhancements in Windows Server 2008. Not any more. The Share And Storage Management snap-in provided by the File Server role makes managing volumes and shares easier than ever before with its two new wizards. The Provision Storage Wizard provides an integrated storage provisioning experience for performing tasks like creating a new LUN, specifying the LUN type, unmasking a LUN, and creating and formatting a volume. The wizard also supports multiple protocols-including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SAS-and it requires only a VDS 1.1 hardware provider. The Provision A Shared Folder Wizard provides an integrated file-share provisioning experience that lets you easily configure permissions, quotas, file screens, and other settings for SMB shares, and it supports NFS shares also.

Then there’s Storage Explorer, a new MMC snap-in that provides a tree-structured view of detailed information concerning all the components of your Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN, including Fabrics, Platforms, Storage Devices, and LUNs. And it provides integrated support for Microsoft Multipath IO (MPIO), which enables software and hardware vendors to develop multipathing solutions that work effectively with solutions built using Windows Server 2008 and vendor-supplied storage hardware devices. And the built-in iSCSI Initiator lets you configure a target iSCSI storage device, plug your server and storage device into a Gigabit Ethernet switch, and-presto!-you’ve now got high-speed block storage over IP. And there’s iSCSI Boot, which lets you install Windows Server 2008 directly to an iSCSI volume on a SAN. The enhanced Windows Server Backup uses the same block-level, image-based (.vhd) backup technology that is used by the CompletePC Backup And Recovery feature of Windows Vista.

How’s all that for your lowly, much-maligned file server? Find out more about storage improvements and lots more in Chapter 12.