Dell Storage with Microsoft Storage Spaces Best Practices Guide

Enclosure awareness provides an extra layer of fault-tolerance by ensuring that data copies are spread across the available enclosures, such that the loss of an entire enclosure still allows access to the data. Enclosure awareness requires at least three storage enclosures.

Enclosure awareness is configured when you create a VD.

Run the following PowerShell command for enabling enclosure awareness.

New-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName <vdName> -StoragePoolFriendlyName <poolName> -IsEnclosureAware <$true|$false> -ProvisioningType Fixed -ResiliencySettingName <Simple| Mirror| Parity> -PhysicalDiskRedundancy <1|2> -StorageTiers <ssdTierObject, hddTierObject> -StorageTierSizes <ssdTierSize , hddTierSize>

For example,

A new VD is created with the name exampleVD3 in storage pool MyPool1. This VD uses enclosure awareness so the IsEnclosureAware attribute is set to $true.

New-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName exampleVD3 -StoragePoolFriendlyName MyPool1 -IsEnclosureAware $true -ProvisioningType Fixed -ResiliencySettingName Mirror -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 1 -StorageTiers $ssd_tier, $hdd_tier -StorageTierSizes 20GB, 10TB