Книга: Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage, Security, & Networking Pocket Consultant

Using, configuring, and managing NTFS disk quotas

Windows Server 2012 R2 supports two mutually exclusive types of disk quotas:

? NTFS disk quotas NTFS disk quotas are supported on all editions of Windows Server 2012 R2 and enable you to manage disk space usage by users. You configure quotas on a per-volume basis. Although users who exceed limits get warnings, administrators are notified primarily through the event logs.

? Resource Manager disk quotas Resource Manager disk quotas are supported on all editions of Windows Server 2012 R2, allowing you to manage disk space usage by folder, by file type, and by volume. Users who are approaching or have exceeded a limit can be automatically notified by email. The notification system also allows for notifying administrators by email, triggering incident reporting, running commands, and logging related events.

The sections that follow discuss NTFS disk quotas.

NOTE Regardless of the quota system being used, you can configure quotas only for NTFS volumes. You can’t create quotas for FAT, FAT32, or ReFS volumes.

REAL WORLD When you apply disk quotas, you need to be particularly careful in the way you enforce quotas, especially with respect to system accounts, service accounts, or other special purpose accounts. Improper application of disk quotas to these types of accounts can cause serious problems that are difficult to diagnose and resolve. enforcing quotas on the System, NetworkService, and LocalService accounts could prevent the computer from completing important operating system tasks. As an example, if these accounts reach their enforced quota limit, you would not be able to apply changes to Group Policy because the Group Policy client runs within a LocalSystem context by default and would not be able to write to the system disk. If the service can’t write to the system disk, Group Policy changes cannot be made, and being unable to change Group Policy could have all sorts of unexpected consequences because you would be stuck with the previously configured settings. For example, you would be unable to disable or modify the quota settings through Group Policy.

In this scenario, where service contexts have reached an enforced quota limit, any other configuration settings that use these service contexts and require making changes to files on disk would likely also fail. For example, you would be unable to complete the installation or removal of roles, role services, and features. This would leave the server in a state in which Server Manager always includes a warning that you need to restart the computer to complete configuration tasks, but restarting the computer would not resolve these issues.

To address this problem, you need to edit the disk quota entries for the system disk, raise the enforced limits on the service accounts, and then restart the computer. Restarting the computer triggers the finalization tasks and enables the computer to complete any configuration tasks stuck in a pending status. Because the Group Policy client service could process changes and write them to the system disk, changes to Group Policy would then be applied as well.

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