Cluster creation and enabling Storage Spaces Direct configuration on the cluster creates only a storage pool and does not provision any virtual disks in the storage pool. Use the New-Volume cmdlet to provision new virtual disks as the shared volumes for the cluster.
When creating volumes in the Azure Stack HCI cluster infrastructure:
- Ensure that you create multiple volumes—a multiple of the number of servers in the cluster. For optimal performance, each cluster node should own at least one virtual disk volume. Virtual machines (VMs) on each volume perform optimally when running on the volume owner node.
- Limit the number of volumes in the cluster to 64 on the Azure Stack HCI operating system.
- Ensure that the storage pool has enough reserve capacity for any in-place volume repairs due to failed disk replacement. The reserved capacity must be at least equivalent to the size of one capacity drive per server and up to four drives.
- A single node cluster supports two three-way mirror volumes and nested two-way mirror volumes.
For general guidance about planning volume creation, see Planning volumes in Storage Spaces Direct.
Note: Dell Technologies recommends that you use the following resiliency settings when you create virtual disks:
- On the Azure Stack HCI operating system clusters with three or more nodes—Three-way mirror.
- On the Azure Stack HCI operating system clusters with four or more nodes—Three-way mirror or mirror-accelerated parity.
Note: A hard drive is the fault domain in a single-node cluster, as compared to StorageScaleUnit in a multi-node cluster.