In the previous blog post I demonstrated how to build a proof of concept environment using Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct using virtual machines on VMware vSphere. Expanding on the concepts that I covered in the previous post, I'm going to show you how to fully automate the installation and configuration process using Microsoft's free hypervisor and deployment software, namely Hyper-V Server 2016 and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013 Update 1. If you follow the steps in this post, at the end you will have a fully automated, entirely free Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform including shared storage [...]

This is a two part series. To read the second post, click here. A couple years ago Microsoft released a new feature in Windows Server called Storage Spaces. From the customers that I work with, the feature has not been widely adopted, but has attracted much interest from Microsoft shops, particularly those looking to leverage for Hyper-V SMB storage or for scale-out private clouds. I suspect this is mostly due to one of the original limitations of Storage Spaces, requiring all hosts in the cluster to see the local storage, either directly or through JBOD SAS expanders, which are not [...]