Keeping those testing virtual machines from hogging all your available disk space with Windows Server 2012’s Storage Spaces

At least for me, much of my (work-related) disk space goes to keeping and storing virtual machines. I generally start a new virtual machine per customer and/or project, and especially when programming server applications, you often find that several virtual machines are needed. For instance, one project I'm currently working on requires three: domain controller, server application and the database.

So far, I've used traditional internal disks to store my files, but more often than not, those disks get full and more needs to be installed. A real NAS solution would perhaps be a fit solution, but it sounds a little overkill when talking about development and testing.

So I've recently investigated a feature in Windows Server 2012 called Storage Spaces. This feature allows you to collect a bunch of disks together, and specify what kind of fault-tolerance you prefer (similar to RAID levels 1 and 5).

However, what's interesting is that the disk space is virtualized: you can create a virtual space of, say, 50 TB (terabytes) but have only physical disks for 4 TB. Once you are getting close to the physical limit, you can simply add more disks, and then you can again continue working and storing more data until the physical limit is reached.

I found a nice IT Pro article on this feature, be sure to check it out.