Windows NAS with Hyper-V, SMB direct, ntfs ACL, Storage Spaces, Refs (and ZFS)
In current ZFS web-gui Napp-it cs dev I am working to add full support for Windows Storage Spaces. First I only wanted to make sure that disks used by a Windows Storage Pool could not be attached to a ZFS pool and vice versa.
I have had a quite bad opinion of the Windows Storage Pool and Storage Spaces concept. But at second look I must say that it is very flexible, more than realtime raid like ZFS or other non-raid concepts. The performance was often called as bad but that seems only true when you format Storage Spaces with a default 4K setting instead a faster 64-512K setting with a lower space efficiency for smaller files. Using thick provisioning instead thin provisioning is another item where you choose between space efficiency vs performance.
So why not add full support for Windows mainly Windows 10/11 or Windows Server with the SMB direct, the fastest SMB option with RDMA. Nearly everyone has it or knows it and it has some premium features like Hyper-V, SMB direct/RDMA and superiour ntfs ACL (over Posix ACL), a very flexible Pool handling with any disks (size and type) or data tiering. ReFS offers Performance and the two main ZFS advantages Checksums and Copy on Write. The upcoming support of ZFS makes it a perfect combination. The reason that there are not too many thinking of a Windows NAS or AiO is a really bad usability, a very confusing naming of Storage Spaces and especially that you absolutely need Powershell to handle it. The tools on the GUI are not too helpful, not well organized and offer only very basic settings. Remembers me at my first steps with ZFS and the zfs and zpool commands at console beside instead two commands you have several douzens. I will try to close the gap to ZFS NAS appliances on Linix/Unix with my web-gui.
So first a few Basics of a Windows NAS
1. disks
Quite easy if you think at physical disks. But with Windows you have also virtual disks, see my menu Disks
Basid an SSD and an USB Stick, you see iSCSI targets from my OmniOS fileserver (Comstar). A very special disk type are those with manufacturer Msft. These are filebased virtual disks intended for Hyper-V. They are fast, can be thin provisioned and size up to over 50000GB.
see menu Disks > Windows Management > Filebased Virtualdisks where you can create or connect/disconnect them or check if they are part of a Windows pool.
If you always place filebased virtualdisks on a location like c:\vhdx, v:\vhdx or on SMB shares like \\ip\vhdx you can handle them without additional configuration.
Storage Spaces
This is not a diskbased raid concept, just a bunch of disks of different type or size. If you create Storage Spaces, you can define per Space if you want redundancy or striping over different disks via data chunks not disk redundancy, Hotspare and data tiering is possible.
ZFS Raid
OpenZFS 2.2.3 on Windows has reached rc6.
Some remaining compatibility problems with Windows but more than ready for first tests. You can choose if you want ZFS filesystems with realtime dedup, encryption, compress, hybrid pools for small io, safe sync write, snapshots, replication with open files (these features are not in ReFS) or ReFS that is faster than current ZFS
