Microsoft Virtualization Secrets

Managing Centralized Data Storage

While the price of storage has come down, a huge amount of work is still required to handle backups and maintain data, so ensuring that file server resources are used efficiently is very important. This section briefly covers two key technologies that will become an administrator’s best friend as more and more data is centralized and stored on file servers in the datacenter.

Using File Server Resource Management

Logical size would differ from physical size if, for example, the data were compressed. If the logical size of a compressed file is 10MB, the physical space used on disk may only be 2MB.

Windows Server 2003 R2 introduced a brand-new suite of tools called File Server Resource Manager (FSRM). The goal of FSRM was to give administrators a better handle on the data stored on file servers. Prior to FSRM, the only tool administrators really had was the Quota capability on NTFS volumes; however, the quota could only be set for an entire volume and it was based on the logical size of the data, not the physical size. With the initial release under Windows Server 2003 R2, and in Windows Server 2008, the FSRM functionality was divided into three areas:

• Storage Reports Management
• Quota Management
• File Screening Management

An additional component, File Classification Infrastructure (FCI), was added in Windows Server 2008 R2, which I will cover in the Using File Classification Infrastructure section.

Storage Reports Management

The Storage Reports ...