Discovering and Partitioning Physical Disks

Before beginning, review Preparing Physical Disks for Management for important information.

CAUTION:  If you are using the Network Managed Volumes (NMV) option, do NOT partition your disks.  SKIP THIS SECTION.  NMVs can only be created from unpartitioned disks.  

This topic provides instructions, using native Windows disk management utilities on the storage server, to prepare partition-based physical disks for storage management. The partitions created will ultimately be transformed into virtual volumes by SANmelody software and then mapped to application servers for use by local applications. The virtual volumes created 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. The partitions you create may be normal or fault-tolerant partitions. There is a 1 petabyte (PB) limit on the size of a disk that can be managed.

Adding storage resources does not affect the operation of the current configuration, the storage server does not have to be stopped to apply the changes.

WARNING: In Windows Server 2008, partitions may be deleted even if managed by SANmelody software. If deleting partitions in Windows Disk Management, heed all warnings and ensure partitions are NOT being  managed by SANmelody software before deleting them!

Follow these steps to prepare your physical disks for use:

1. In Windows Computer Management, open System Tools>Device Manager.

2. Select Disk Drives, and choose Scan for Hardware Changes from the context menu. Ensure that all disks connected to the storage server are discovered.
   

3. Open Storage>Disk Management to display all visible disks. Ensure all disks to be managed are online and initialized. Initialization adds signatures to the disks; a requirement of the SANmelody software in order to manage them. The Windows disks may be basic or dynamic.
   WARNING: Do not attempt to manage any unallocated space that may be available on the boot disk with SANmelody software.
   
   In the example below, Disks 1 and 2 are candidates for SANmelody storage management, but need partitions.
   

4. Any unallocated physical disks may be broken down into smaller logical drives. SANmelody software supports up to a maximum of 256 partitions or volumes on a single disk. New volumes can be simple, spanned, striped, mirrored, or RAID-5. Use the appropriate New Volume wizard in Disk Management to create unformatted partitions on the unallocated disks.  Follow the wizard instructions to create the required number and size of partitions on each disk.
   Important:  Do NOT format and do NOT assign drive letters on the partitions.
   (If you need additional information about the New Volume wizard or Disk Management, please refer to Microsoft Windows documentation.)
   
   In the example below, Disks 1 and 2 have been partitioned and are ready to be managed by SANmelody software.
   

5. These instructions are performed locally; if you have two storage servers in your configuration follow these steps on both servers.

Back to Getting Started.

Discovering and Partitioning Physical Disks