Hi all,
I wanted to put this suggestion forward because it seems like a feature that Microsoft, and its customers, would be very interested in.

MS seems to want to enter the Software Defined Storage and Software Defined SAN space with it's design decisions in WS 2016 and this puts it up against the likes of traditional vendors such as IBM, EMC and Netapp. This would place commodity hardware at the same level of these NAS / SANS with WS 2016 running over it and for the vast majority the OS can handle those demands with its new features such as storage replica, storage spaces direct and other goodies.

However I have found one major flexibility point where I think MS needs to improve and that is when you create a cluster fileserver role you can only place that role in the same domain, or lack of domain if it's a workgroup cluster, of that cluster node. This runs up against some issues if you want to transparently serve files to people in non trusted domains or if you don't want to have to split up your cluster nodes to host them on differing domains thereby having to invest in more hardware or reducing redundancy.

Say for example you have a "production" storage cluster serving iscsi, NFS and SMB to hypervisor systems as well as clients directly, as a NAS / SAN would, but you have separate authentication principals for your test and development environments that you don't trust. It would be much easier to create a new file server role, choose the domain for which it will authenticate to and then allow it to serve files to those non trusted environments transparently. Netapp, for example, achieves this through it's vserver configuration so you can have your production hardware and slice up your SMB servers for each environment as you need them.

This feature would involve a few changes to the way file server roles function, most likely spawning off a new SMB server process for that role as well as a separate SMB "stack", the process would run under an originating domain account but would have access to the Kerberos tokens of the untrusted domain through a created service account. This account would probably be the computer account that the file server role creates in the AD. You would also have to change the way permissions were queried on the cluster node so that cluster disks handled by the file server role went through a slightly different lookup process as well as filtering out any ACLs that the cluster role displayed to clients that didn't consist of local server permissions or the configured authenticating domains.

So why would you do all this and not create a trust between the domains and make your life a **** of a lot easier? Politics, that and environment separation. The storage environment for enterprises is in a unique situation where it needs to provide clients access to resources in separate environments that may not want to have anything to do with each other. You could also hyper-V up your hardware and cut the environments up but that is a lot more complicated and raises other configuration issues that are a lot more complicated than this proposal.

Anyway, I think this would be a useful addition to the storage bow that is Windows.

Thanks for reading. :)

P.S.: Please add tiering to parity storage spaces, thanks! :)

Setting $ErrorActionPreference to Stop is ignored by New-SmbShare (and possibly other CIM wrapped functions) in specific use cases:

• Run within Windows ISE: No problem


• Invoked using powershell.exe -File argument: No problem


• Called with explicit -ErrorAction Stop: No problem


• Run within PowerShell Prompt (dot-sourced): $ErrorActionPreference is ignored


• Invoked using powershell.exe -Command argument: $ErrorActionPreference is ignored

This can be tested with the following script (test.ps1):

$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"
New-SmbShare -Name "Test" -Path "C:\NonExistingPath"
Write-Host "Should not be reached"

The following call shows the error "The system cannot find the file specified", but also shows "Should never be reached", which is incorrect:
powershell.exe -Command .\test.ps1

The following call just throws the "The system cannot find the file specified", which is correct:
powershell.exe -File .\test.ps1

Requirements:
- PowerShell 4 or higher
- Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 8.1 or higher

I have a 3 node cluster setup and validated for Storage Spaces Direct. Each node has two 1TB SSDs and two 4TB HDDs (total 6 of each) all of which are cleaned of partitions and data (running on Dell HBA330s). All nodes have the required networking in places, are joined in a cluster and are running Server 2016 TP5 with the latest updates. Running cluster validation for Storage Spaces direct comes back with only the warning about 3 node cluster vs 4 (I only want mirrors, so 3 should work).

The problem is no matter what I do I cannot seem to get a proper virtual disk to create. I am trying to create a tiered disk with the SSD space as a hot tier and HDD space as a cold tier, each in a mirror. If I try this from Powershell I get "The storage pool does not have sufficient eligible resources for the creation of the specified virtual disk". From the GUI in failover cluster manager I can get to the Size screen, but the free space readings are always under a few GB and change each time I run the GUI.

Here is what I get on a fresh manual setup via PS:

PS C:> Enable-ClusterStorageSpacesDirect -Autoconfig $false

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Performing operation 'Enable Cluster Storage Spaces Direct' on Target 'IGA-S2D'.
[Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help (default is "Y"): y

PS C:> Get-StorageSubSystem

FriendlyName HealthStatus OperationalStatus

Windows Storage on IGA-S2D1 Healthy OK
Clustered Windows Storage on IGA-S2D Healthy OK

PS C:> New-StoragePool -StorageSubSystemFriendlyName "Clustered Windows Storage on IGA-S2D" -FriendlyName S2D -Provisio
ningTypeDefault Fixed -PhysicalDisk (Get-PhysicalDisk | ? CanPool -eq $true)

FriendlyName OperationalStatus HealthStatus IsPrimordial IsReadOnly

S2D OK Healthy False False

PS C:> $pool = Get-StoragePool S2D
PS C:> $pool | Get-PhysicalDisk | FT FriendlyName,OperationalStatus,HealthStatus,Usage,Size

FriendlyName OperationalStatus HealthStatus Usage Size

ATA Samsung SSD 850 OK Healthy Auto-Select 1024081264640
ATA Samsung SSD 850 OK Healthy Auto-Select 1024081264640
ATA WDC WD4002FYYZ-0 OK Healthy Auto-Select 4000762036224
ATA WDC WD4002FYYZ-0 OK Healthy Auto-Select 4000762036224
ATA Samsung SSD 850 OK Healthy Auto-Select 1024081264640
ATA WDC WD4002FYYZ-0 OK Healthy Auto-Select 4000762036224
ATA WDC WD4002FYYZ-0 OK Healthy Auto-Select 4000762036224
ATA WDC WD4002FYYZ-0 OK Healthy Auto-Select 4000762036224
ATA WDC WD4002FYYZ-0 OK Healthy Auto-Select 4000762036224
ATA Samsung SSD 850 OK Healthy Auto-Select 1024081264640
ATA Samsung SSD 850 OK Healthy Auto-Select 1024081264640
ATA Samsung SSD 850 OK Healthy Auto-Select 1024081264640

PS C:> New-StorageTier -StoragePoolUniqueID ($pool).UniqueID -FriendlyName SSD -MediaType SSD -ResiliencySettingName Mirror

ObjectId : {1}\IGA-S2D\root/Microsoft/Windows/Storage/Providersv2\SPACESStorageTier.ObjectId="{6116563

                     c-31ed-4aa3-a54c-90034eddd5d3}:ST:{72ceedad-fa7c-4e66-9b0a-4c83782c8891}{fd5eeb52-486c-4dd9-8f

                     5c-7b0dfb52dcc8}"

PassThroughClass :
PassThroughIds :
PassThroughNamespace :
PassThroughServer :
UniqueId : {fd5eeb52-486c-4dd9-8f5c-7b0dfb52dcc8}
Description :
FriendlyName : SSD
Interleave : 262144
MediaType : SSD
NumberOfColumns : Auto
NumberOfGroups : 1
PhysicalDiskRedundancy : 1
ResiliencySettingName : Mirror
Size : 0
PSComputerName :

PS C:> New-StorageTier -StoragePoolUniqueID ($pool).UniqueID -FriendlyName HDD -MediaType HDD -ResiliencySettingName Mirror

ObjectId : {1}\IGA-S2D\root/Microsoft/Windows/Storage/Providersv2\SPACESStorageTier.ObjectId="{6116563

                     c-31ed-4aa3-a54c-90034eddd5d3}:ST:{72ceedad-fa7c-4e66-9b0a-4c83782c8891}{a9a4faab-0498-4b98-84

                     d4-950a35778d3c}"

PassThroughClass :
PassThroughIds :
PassThroughNamespace :
PassThroughServer :
UniqueId : {a9a4faab-0498-4b98-84d4-950a35778d3c}
Description :
FriendlyName : HDD
Interleave : 262144
MediaType : HDD
NumberOfColumns : Auto
NumberOfGroups : 1
PhysicalDiskRedundancy : 1
ResiliencySettingName : Mirror
Size : 0
PSComputerName :

PS C:> New-Volume -StoragePool $pool -FriendlyName Mirror -FileSystem CSVFS_REFS -StorageTierFriendlyNames SSD,HDD -Sto
rageTierSizes 10GB, 100GB
Invoke-CimMethod : 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 NumberOfColumns that is less than or equal to the number of physical disks in the storage fault
domain selected for the virtual disk.

Activity ID: {5daef213-f30c-4064-9531-a19be278f73c}
At C:\windows\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\Modules\Storage\StorageScripts.psm1:1047 char:27
+ ... $output = Invoke-CimMethod -CimSession $session -InputObject $pool ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+ CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (StorageWMI:) [Invoke-CimMethod], CimException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : StorageWMI 1,Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimCmdlets.InvokeCimMethodCommand

As you can see there should be more than enough disk space for the requested disk. It does not matter what sizes I use the same thing occurs.

If I allow the Enable-ClusterStorageSpacesDirect to auto configure it created a storage pool with my disks. The only difference is it attempts to assign all of the SSDs as Journal disks, which would be a waste. I still cant create any meaningful virtual disk with the auto-created pool, even if I change the SSDs back to auto from journal (tried both ways).

I have also tried all of this from the Failover cluster manager GUI and the Server Manager GUI. Both report odd free space numbers and even if I request a disk inside of those (1GB tiered disk) it will still fail.