Windows Server 2022 Software RAID 1 Installation?

[cyberstud]

I have two very small customers that I upgraded to new HP Servers with Windows Server 2022 Essentials.

I always felt bad having them pay over $3000 for a small office setup and these servers came out to around $1800 with 32GB HP Ram and 1TB(x2) Hard Drives.

All of my IT life I have used HW Raid and never used Windows Software Raid.

Well, it has been an eye opener. There is very little info on how to set up a RAID 1 scenario with two identical disks. If there is any info, it is usually old and sometimes in other languages.

So I have made my first attempts (making dynamic disks, etc) and while it is possible to make the bootable C partition mirror, I cannot make a D partition to put data. In fact, I cannot even extend the C partition with the unallocated space.

I get an error of “the size of the extent is less than the minimum” trying to extend, make new volumes or try to mirror a data partition.

I have run across someone’s writeup on how to do it with command line DISKPART tool and I am about to try it but this should not be this difficult.

Can someone shed some light on the issues and solutions to get this simple setup going?

[jkzfixme]

It’s been forever and a day so please take this with a grain of salt, The only time I work with software raid in the last decade is with zfs.

As I recall it you installed on one disk as per usual and then hop into disk management , right click on the one you want to mirror and go through the wizard. My windows workstation has the option but it’s greyed out probably due to not having another disk available to mirror. Someone will probably have an idea on how to do during installation but this might get you through

[cyberstud]

Yes, I thought it would be that simple but it turned out that there are a lot of other things to do. In fact, you have to be concerned on things that most of take for granted.

For instance, I ran the Server 2022 setup and created a 200GB CDrive, and left 700GB unallocated to be used to make a data drive (D:) later.

The instructions and the Disk Manager tool have you convert the disk to a Dynamic disk. I then tried to mirror but only the C drive will mirror. No other partition will.

Worse, I cannot use the allocated space as there are no options for all of the other partitions that work.

[jkzfixme]

Did you right click on where it says Disk 0 ? You want to mirror the disk, not the partition. Ditch the boot disk, install on one disk, let it do the partitions in setup, make sure the other disk is just raw space, then mirror disks as advised.

[cyberstud]

Again that is what I thought would happen but it does not mirror the disk. Instead, you have to convert it to a dynamic disk and go through several processes. If you simply click mirror, it will get you to convert the disks to dynamic.

I am assuming you have not tried this on Windows Server 2022?

[jkzfixme]

Hey bud I get that you are frustrated, but saying things like ‘again’ is rude to folks trying to help you out.

I have used hardware raid on windows server for the last couple of decades or so for one offs, but for the most part have been in larger scale enterprise environments where I am fully virtualized. That being said I am pretty sure that I have done it this way as well as via the cli on 2012r2 or 2016, not sure which. Neither diskpart nor disk manager have changed in the last decade or two, so I would think it would work on more modern versions of server 2012.

would you be more comfortable if I wrote it all out for CLI using diskpart ?

[cyberstud]

Not trying to be rude and I know you are trying to help but I am insisting that it is not what you think. I know quite a lot about Disk Manager and DISKPART and I am telling you that they are not working as expected or the various instructions from the Internet.

I had collected some Disk Manager and Diskpart images to demonstrate but I do not see an option to add images. Maybe if I make another reply.

[cyberstud]

I guess you can only add one attachment per reply. Should have used a picture so I edited.

This is what happens when I try to delete the recovery partition using DiskPart.

[cyberstud]

The first is the end result of tryin to make a Simple Volume with DiskManager.

The second is an example of the options that you get when you right click on some parttions. Only Help

[ikesmith5617 (AmericanGeek)]

I can confirm: Server 2022 does not have the mirror drive option, only the C partition can be allowed to be mirrored, which totally defeats the purpose of “raid 1” if you could call it that in this case.

I’ve not found a solution either.

other than hardware…and oh ya…finding a RAID card that supports the supermicro H12ssl-i with windows server 2022…good luck…not one vendor would say their card can work in my case, i’ve had to return raid cards and am still looking for a raid card for this setup.

[cyberstud]

Sorry for a late reply. I have not logged in for awhile.

I am doing the Intel solution but hardly anyone knows how to do it. I will post notes.

[mikehoneycutt]

Did you get this to work, if so what did you do?

[cyberstud]

Sorry for the delay.

I found out the hard way that the reason almost everything concerning Software RAID on Windows is actually deprecated. That is why almost all info is from 2012 and other old dates.

There is no viable solution via Microsoft to do real RAID. The option that they refer to does not allow RAID on the OS partition. So if that partition goes down the Server will go down.

As such I have been testing using the Intel chip solution of RAID.

[iShango]

This is really long winded but is Microsofts latest iteration of the instructions for Raid 1 on x64 Windows.

Establish and boot to GPT mirrors in 64-bit Windows - Windows Server

I used these instructions but had issues with the redundancy not working as required,i.e. it wouldn’t boot from the secondary disk.
https://www.libe.net/en/mirror-hdd.

Somewhere between these two is an answer (Use a Raid controller) that will work.