Preparing Physical Disks for Management
Take a moment now to consider your initial SAN configuration:
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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?
CAUTION: 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 SANmelody 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 Basics of SAN Infrastructure about Storage Devices.
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Disks marked as “Removable” in Windows Disk Management cannot be used as storage resources.
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After disks are managed by SANmelody software, use the SANmelody software to control and monitor the disks.
If using the Network Managed Volumes (NMV) feature.
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Physical disks added to NMV pools must be initialized in GPT layout, unpartitioned, basic Windows disks.
If using partition-based physical disks (that will not be used with the NMV feature) :
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Physical disks must be initialized with 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 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!
Important Notes about disks to be proxied:
WARNING: It is crucial to enable Proxy Mode on the storage server before attaching the original host volumes to the storage server. If the storage server is not in Proxy Mode, it will discover the original host volumes and write data to the disk, possibly corrupting the file system and/or data. If data is written to the disk, the original partition table would be damaged, rendering the disk unreadable by the host. Thus, when you configure a volume as a Proxied Volume, SANmelody software sees the disk simply as a sequence of disk blocks and does not try to impose its own format on the device. When Proxy Mode is enabled, the storage server will automatically restart. (See Enabling/Disabling Proxy Mode.)
Back to Getting Started.