Sometimes you might require high performance storage on a standalone server system - for example on a system running quite speedy backup storage.

One of the many ways to do this is to take a standalone windows server and enable storagebuscache - this allows you to use flash devices (mostly NVMe) as cache tier for rotational storage.

Technically storagebuscache creates bindings between disks so that a fast device is the cache for a certain amount of slower devices. This implies that it works best if you have a multiple of slow devices than fast ones.

Steps to enable storage bus cache

The steps required to enable SBC are:

• Install Failover-Clusterin components (required to provide SBL)
• Enable StorageBusCache
• Create volume(s)

Enable clustering features

First, enable the failover-clustering features:

Install-WindowsFeature -Name Failover-Clustering –IncludeManagementTools

This is required because storagebuscache is building on top of storage bus layer which is a feature of failover-clustering. Having said that, you don't need to create a cluster.

Enable storagebuscache

Having enabled clustering, now it's time to enable storagebus cache

Enable-StorageBusCache

This will enable the storagebuscache and create a mapping of cache devices already.

Create a volume

Having set up the cache, it's time to create some volume to actually store data.

New-Volume -FriendlyName SBC-Vol-0 -FileSystem ReFS -StoragePoolFriendlyName SBC-Pool -ResiliencySettingName Parity -PhysicalDiskRedundancy 2 -Size 1024GB

I'm using parity here as we're having a very fast write cache that receives the write-bursts. Besides bursts that don't exceed the cache size, the workload is not too heavy, parity can write down data fast enough.

Checking the cache status

To check the status, you can use

Get-StorageBusCache

This might look like this

Get-StorageBusCache


ProvisionMode             : Shared
SharedCachePercent        : 15
CacheMetadataReserveBytes : 34359738368
CacheModeHDD              : ReadWrite
CacheModeSSD              : WriteOnly
CachePageSizeKBytes       : 16
Enabled                   : True

To check out the bindings, you can use this:

Get-StorageBusBinding

DeviceGuid                             DeviceNumber CacheDeviceGuid                        CacheDeviceNumber CacheMode DirtyByteCount TotalByteCount
----------                             ------------ ---------------                        ----------------- --------- -------------- --------------
{5db88fe5-1178-31df-e8d6-836e1823baf3} 506          {63679f99-bd48-c371-73fd-87bfa10c84ab} 512               WriteOnly            0 B            0 B
{3d66e3a1-d900-8c70-1860-cff6a82e1aa0} 502          {873b315d-c5a1-39b7-8028-7b3095c56e42} 509               WriteOnly            0 B            0 B
{46f64419-0fac-fea2-8171-c2e730da8e28} 504          {6ac3c97d-c429-5d63-33d2-400365a9624e} 510               WriteOnly            0 B            0 B
{f28fdca1-42fc-ea75-5d51-4e4dd403b1e0} 507          {38b68476-a31b-2bc1-f230-b2e6f1637c20} 511               WriteOnly            0 B            0 B