Lately I’ve been running some Storage Spaces Direct labs on VMware workstation. Part of doing labs means testing things until something breaks and as a countermeasure I tend to create snapshots frequently. Now this led me to an issue that I haven’t seen anyone write about online.

It turns out that creating snapshots messes with the detection of the Windows storage MediaType.

When there are no snapshots present everything works as expected. The CMDlet Get-Physical disk returns the MediaType that is actually in use. In my case this is SSD.

However when you create a snapshot and powercycle the VM the CMDlet returns a MediaType of Unspecified.

I tested this with version 15.5.2 build-15785246 of VMware workstation both with snapshots with the VM powered on and powered off. I also tested the same procedure on vSphere but did not have the same issue there.

This issue is something to be mindful of when creating S2D clusters as it requires to be the MediaTypes to be the same across nodes. In my case I only created a snapshot on the first node and the cluster validation script returned an error. Removing the snapshot and powercycle the VM. Simply rebooting won’t do you any good!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *