upgrade

Storage Spaces Inaccessible After Windows Server 2012 R2 Upgrade

Windows Server 2012 R2 has some nice new features and improvements on existing features for users of Storage Spaces so there is a definite appeal for users of Windows Server 2012 to want to upgrade to Windows Server 2012 R2.  If you opt to do an in-place upgrade to preserve your existing Storage Spaces so that you can get your service up and running with the hope of being able to use them straight off the bat in Windows Server 2012 R2, you may encounter an error Read-only by user action and you need to perform some corrective steps to use them again.

Storage Space Read-Only User Action

This is what your Storage Spaces may look like if you open the Storage Spaces control panel item after the upgrade. As you can see, the spaces are in-tact and will report all of the space names and capacity from prior to the upgrade but instead of being online as you are used to seeing, you instead have this information icon and a message alongside the pool capacity indicator Read-only by user action. This is a built in protection feature of Windows Server 2012 R2 which takes your Storage Spaces offline by default after an upgrade. We just simply need to bring them online to use them. This is very similar to how in Windows Server 2003, a disk connected from an external system from a software RAID set could be marked as Foreign and the configuration of the disk needs to be imported first.

Changing the Storage Pool Status to Read/Write

To do this, open an administrative PowerShell prompt. At PowerShell, enter the two Cmdlets as follows:

Get-StoragePool | Where-Object {$_.IsReadOnly -eq $True} | Set-StoragePool -IsReadOnly $False
Get-VirtualDisk | Where-Object {$_.IsManualAttach -eq $True} | Set-VirtualDisk -IsManualAttach $False

If you forget to elevate the PowerShell prompt by running it as an administrator you will get access denied responses to the two Cmdlets as you aren’t running the Cmdlets with your administrative rights. Simply close PowerShell and re-open it by right-clicking and using the Run as Administrator option.

Bring the Storage Spaces Online

Once you’ve entered the Cmdlets above, returning to the Storage Spaces control panel applet now, you will see the information shown has updated.

Storage Space Offline by Policy

As you can see, the Storage Spaces are now reporting their status as OK but they are marked as Offline by Policy. To change this and to bring the Storage Spaces online, simply click the Bring Online option next to each Storage Space and it will be brought online and granted a drive letter.

Check, Verify and Reminder

It’s important to note here that the drive letter assigned will be the next free letter and not perhaps, the drive letter that you used on the previous installation of Windows Server 2012. If you have a requirement for the Storage Space to be on a particular letter then you will need to go into the Properties of the individual spaces after it has been brought online and change the letter.

It’s also good to remember that any file shares you had on these Storage Spaces may be un-shared through the upgrade process so you should check the existence of your shares either by using the Properties on the drive or folder which you needed to be shared or by using the Share and Storage Management administrative console.

Once you’ve got your Storage Spaces all brought online after the actions above, you should be looking like normality again as shown below.

Storage Space Online Normal

Hopefully someone out there finds this useful and it saves at least a few hair extractions from taking place after a Windows Server 2012 to Windows Server 2012 R2 in-place upgrade. Now it’s time to go and enjoy those new features.

WordPress Upgrade and Hosting Woes

So after typing the Surface Pro article earlier today, I realised that all of my WordPress plugins and my WordPress were out of date. After about an hour of tinkering with plugin versions, authorizing Twitter OAuth plugins and upgrading the main install.

So what’s new? Well the media manager in the admin interface is very nice and welcoming over previous iterations. Internet Explorer 10 still doesn’t get recognized as a modern browser still as logging into the admin interface produces an error that looks like it thinks I’m running IE6 – Something I as hoping would be fixed. Looking at the categories in the admin interface makes me a little sad too because my categories are all over the place so I think I need to spent a few hours aligning and rearranging them, and I also noticed a few quirks with my custom theme which I need to resolve.

Every time I upgrade my WordPress instance though, it reminds me how junk my current hosting provider are. I was only able to get between 10-20Kbps transferring files to and from the FTP site. A ping to the site results in a round-trip time of 165ms and the load times are terrible not to mention the HTTP500 errors I’ve been getting on a couple of my other sites recently because of some new user on the shared server pillaging the MySQL instance.

Normally, I forget about the issue by the time I get round to sorting it, but I’m determined to remember this time especially as my hosting is up for renewal soon, so I’m going to be finding a new home in the UK as UK hosting prices have dropped in recent years. I did take a look at Microsoft Azure earlier today, but the free instance doesn’t allow the use of custom domain names and the shared instance works out at about $45 a month for my sites which is too much.

If anyone knows a good UK hosting provider for £15 or less a month then please feel free to drop me a line.