Preparing Physical Disks for Management
CAUTION: For Proxy Volumes, refer to Preparing Disks to be Proxied Volumes. This topic does not apply.
Some considerations for storage planning:
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How many application servers on your network need storage?
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How many disks do you want each of them to see?
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Do you want them to see one large disk or several smaller ones?
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Will you be using the optional Network Managed Volumes (NMV) feature to create the virtual volumes you will later be mapping to application servers for storage resources?
NOTE: The preparation of disks to be used with the NMV feature is different than the preparation of partition-based disks that will not be used with the NMV feature, as outlined in this topic.
Important Notes about physical disks managed by SANsymphony software:
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No disk can be larger than 1 petabyte (PB).
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No more than a total of 256 partitions on a disk is supported.
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Physical disks can be connected to your storage server in different ways:
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Disks embedded in the storage server chassis.
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External direct-connected disks (JBOD) such as Fibre Channel disks, Serial ATA disks, SAS disks, and SCSI disks.
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For more information, refer to About Storage Devices.
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Disks marked as “Removable” in Windows Disk Management cannot be used as storage resources.
If using the Network Managed Volumes (NMV) feature.
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Physical disks added to NMV pools must be initialized in GPT layout and unpartitioned “basic” Windows disks.
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Are you setting up hot spares— dedicated volumes prevented from being used in any manner other than to replace failed volumes? Refer to Configuring Hot Spare Replacements.
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Are you going to be creating mirrors in the NMV pool for an extra level of fault tolerance?
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Consider performance characteristics to determine the type of pools to create, refer to Pool Types.
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After disks are managed by SANsymphony software, they are no longer accessible in Disk Management, and must be controlled and monitored using SANsymphony software.
If using partition-based physical disks:
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Physical disks must be initialized in MBR layout, partitioned, unformatted, “basic” or “dynamic” Windows disks without drive letters.
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The partitions you create may be normal or fault-tolerant partitions.
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The virtual volumes created from partition-based physical disks will be static (a fixed size) and are based on the size of the partition. Create the partitions in sizes that meet your application server storage needs.
WARNING: In Windows Server 2008, partitions may be deleted even if managed by SANsymphony software. If deleting partitions in Windows Disk Management, heed all warnings and ensure partitions are NOT being managed by SANsymphony software before deleting them!
Now that you are aware of physical disk requirements and have planned your storage requirements:
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If using the NMV feature, refer to Preparing Disks for NMV Pools.
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If using partition-based physical disks, refer to Discovering and Partitioning Physical Disks.