Virtually Extend a Drive

How do I virtually extend a drive to use with the WSC?

WSC allows you to "virtually extend" your Windows drive when the VMS software you are using does not recognize that the archived video data is being offloaded to Wasabi and reports that the drive is full.

Follow the steps below to virtually extend the drive size so the VMS software recognizes the overall storage size that you intend to use to meet your retention requirements.

1. Open a Windows Explorer window and navigate to your storage drives. Here you can see the size of your current Windows drives. For example:

   

2. Within the VMS, you should be able to specify the Windows drive and location that you want to use for your recording storage and the utilization of the drive. The VMS should reflect the size of the current Windows drive.

   

3. Open WSC and make sure that you have WSC configured to be pointing to the drive that your video archives are recording to. This will also affect which Windows Drive gets virtually extended to the new size that you specify in the registry key.

   

4. Make a registry key creation open the Windows registry editor (type "regedit" in Start Menu, Run or CMD).
5. Navigate to Computer\HKEY_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\tierflt.
6. Create a REG_DWORD and name it "VirtualExtensionSize".
7. Modify the newly created DWORD and change its value to the desired volume size in GBs and be sure to select "Decimal". For example, if you want to achieve 30 days of retention with 2 days being on-premise and 28 days being in the cloud you need to specify how much overall storage 30 days will consume. If each day requires 1 TB of storage, then you would specify 30,000 GBs or 30 TBs of virtual drive space.

   

   Note: This is only a virtual extension and not a real one. In reality, the volume will retain its original size, but Windows will report it as 30 TBs to any application such as the VMS software that may want to access it.

   Your registry entry should look like the following highlighted entry:

   

8. After creating the value and exiting out of the registry editor, you can restart the machine for the changes to take effect or restart WSC services via the command prompt.
9. If you want to avoid restarting the machine, you can run the following command lines in an administrative CMD:

    - net stop tiersvc - net stop tierflt - net start tierflt - net start tiersvc

   

   These command lines will restart WSC's main service as well as the tiering filter driver in the correct order.

   Note: If the services don't stop or error out then you will need to restart the server in order for the changes to take effect.

10. Now, when you refresh your Windows Explorer window,  your drive sizes will show/report 30 TBs in size for your recording drive that you have connected in WSC.

    

11. When you check your VMS Software it should also reflect this change and report the new available recording storage amount. If not, you may need to restart the VMS services to refresh the storage reporting.