Replace a Failed Disk in Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces

Failed hard disks are in-evadable. There are many ways to provide resiliency for hard disk failure, and Windows Server 2012/Windows Server 2012 R2’s build in feature to provide this is Storage Spaces.

A hard disk failed inside my Storage Pool, so lets switch over to PowerShell to get this resolved.

Diagnosis#

Firstly, open up an Administrative PowerShell prompt. To get the status of my Storage Space (which I called pool) I run the command:

Get-StoragePool

I can see that my Storage Space named pool is in a degraded state.

To check the health of the volumes sitting inside the Storage Pool, use the command

Get-VirtualDisk

We can see that Media, Software and DocumentsPhotos volumes are have Degraded as their OperationalStatus. This means that they are still attached and accessible, but their reliability cannot be ensured should there be another drive failure. These volumes have either a Parity or Mirror parity setting, which has allowed Storage Spaces to save my data even with the drive failure.

The Backups and VMTemplates have a Detached operational status. I was not using any resiliency mode on this data as it is easily replaced, so it looks like I have lost the data on these volumes.

To get an idea what is happening at the physical disk layer I run the command:

Get-PhysicalDisk

We can see that PhysicalDisk1 is in a failed state. As the HP N40L has a 4 bay enclosure with 4TB Hard Disks in them, it is easy to determine that PhyisicalDisk1 is in the first bay in the enclosure.

Retiring the Failed Disk#

Now I determined which disk had failed, the server was shutdown and the failed disk from the first bay was replaced with a spare 4TB Hard Disk.

With the server back online, open PowerShell back up with administrative permissions and check what the physical disks look like now:

Get-PhysicalDisk

We can see that the new disk that was installed has taken the FriendlyName of PhysicalDisk1 and has a HealthStatus of Healthy. The failed disk has lost its FriendlyName and its OperationalStatus has changed to Lost Communication.

First lets single out the missing disk:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Where-Object { $_.OperationalStatus -eq 'Lost Communication' }

Get-PhysicalDisk filtering out failed disk

Assign the missing disk to a variable:

$missingDisk = Get-PhysicalDisk | Where-Object { $_.OperationalStatus -eq 'Lost Communication' }

Next we need to tell the storage pool that the disk has been retired:

$missingDisk | Set-PhysicalDisk -Usage Retired

Adding a New Disk#

To add the replacement disk into the Storage Pool

# Set the new Disk to a Variable
$replacementDisk = Get-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName PhysicalDisk1

# Add the disk to the Storage Pool
Add-PhysicalDisk -PhysicalDisks $replacementDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName pool

Repairing the Volumes#

The next step after adding the new disk to the Storage Pool is to repair each of the Virtual Disks residing on it.

# To Repair and Individual Volume
Repair-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName DocumentsPhotos

# To Repair all Warning Volumes
Get-VirtualDisk | Where-Object -FilterScript {$_.HealthStatus -Eq 'Warning'} | Repair-VirtualDisk

We can see the the repair running by entering:

Get-VirtualDisk

The OperationalStatus of InService lets us know the volume is currently being repaired. The percentage completion of the repair can be found by running:

Get-StorageJob

Remove the Lost VirtualDisks#

Since there were no parity on the VMTemplates and Backups Volumes, they can be deleted with the following command:

Remove-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName <FriendlyName>

Removing the Failed Disk from the Pool#

This step will not work if you still have Degraded disk in the Storage Pool, so make sure all repairs complete first.

Remove-PhysicalDisk -PhysicalDisks $missingDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName pool

Summary#

To wrap up, to replace a failed disk in a storage pool:

# Find the failed Disk
Get-PhysicalDisk

# Shutdown, take the disk out and reboot. Set the missing disk to a variable
$missingDisk = Get-PhysicalDisk | Where-Object { $_.OperationalStatus -eq 'Lost Communication' }

# Retire the missing disk
$missingDisk | Set-PhysicalDisk -Usage Retired

# Find the name of your new disk
Get-PhysicalDisk

# Set the replacement disk object to a variable
$replacementDisk = Get-PhysicalDisk -FriendlyName PhysicalDisk1

# Add replacement Disk to the Storage Pool
Add-PhysicalDisk -PhysicalDisks $replacementDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName pool

# Repair each Volume
Repair-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName <VolumeName>

# Get the status of the rebuilds
Get-StorageJob

# Remove failed Virtual Disks
Remove-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName <FriendlyName>

# Remove the failed Physical Disk from the pool
Remove-PhysicalDisk -PhysicalDisks $missingDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName pool

The full list of Windows Server Storage Spaces CmdLets can be found on TechNet here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848705.aspx.